STUDENTS' MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF ATMOSPHERIC CARBON BUDGETS: PROBLEMS AND REMEDIATION

Assessments and surveys completed by students in introductory meteorology and geology courses at ISU have revealed that there is a significant misunderstanding of budgets, specifically atmospheric carbon budgets, when given certain source and sink rates. Using a simple “bathtub” model in a simulation program, significant numbers of students in a meteorology class (n=179) did not seem to understand budget concepts such as increasing rates only occurring when inflow > outflow, and decreasing rates only occurring when inflow < outflow. A survey given in fall 2008 to introductory geology students (n=480) revealed a similar misunderstanding of budget concepts, and additionally revealed the vast majority of students (>90 %) were unable to correctly infer the maximum and minimum values on an inflow-outflow graph. These misunderstandings of budgets have been observed even among graduate students at prestigious American universities such as MIT (e.g., Sterman and Sweeney, 2007, Climate Change, V. 80, pp. 213-238), suggesting that this is a widespread phenomenon among the general public. Such misunderstandings can help explain lack of public support for climate change policy but also present an obstacle for students’ leaning in the geosciences. Not understanding these concepts limits the understanding of mass balance problems like glacial budgets, radiation and carbon budgets, and the myriad other applications of the law of conservation in the geosciences. An attempt to remediate this problem was made by constructing and administering an assignment based on Cognitive Flexibility Theory to students in four introductory geology labs (n=64). The assignment was a case-based assignment consisting of four tasks carried out in a hypothetical business scenario on a class management program developed at ISU called ThinkSpace. In the assignment, students had to build knowledge by answering budget questions from multiple representations of open-ended problems and navigating resources made available through the program. Preliminary results reveal that a significant improvement in understanding of budget concepts occurred among the students that participated in the assignment compared to students who were just exposed to budgets during a lecture (n=368).