DEVELOPING SECONDARY STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF THE EARTH’S CLIMATE THROUGH COMPUTER-BASED GLOBAL CLIMATE MODELS

Understanding global climate change requires sense-making about the Earth’s climate over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Although K-12 climate literacy efforts are supported by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) and the Essential Principles for Climate Literacy (NOAA, 2009), understanding global climate change is challenging for K-12 students. They underestimate the impact of changing climate on various ecosystems (Shepardson, Niyogi, Choi & Charusombat, 2009) and perceive uncertainty in climate data as a complete lack of information about it (Pallant & Lee, 2015; Pruneau, Gravel, Courque & Langis, 2003). Conducted through data-based explorations, and model-based simulations, interventions focusing on epistemology have been successful for building students’ conceptions about the phenomenon of global climate change (Hofer, 2001; Kelly & McDonald, 2012). However, in absence of a guiding framework, student engagement with climate models remains apparent. This presentation will describe student learning outcomes from the first year of a NSF-funded CliMES (Climate Literacy and Modeling Epistemology of Science) project, which aims to develop secondary students’ reasoning about the Earth’s climate using a global climate model- EzGCM. Aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, state science standards and model-based learning framework (Forbes et al., 2015), a 3-week curriculum module was designed and implemented in ten secondary classrooms during Spring 2018. Students’ knowledge of climate data and their engagement with EzGCM were investigated through quantitative and qualitative analysis of data obtained from concept inventory survey, assessment tasks and student interviews. We specifically asked 1) how do secondary geoscience students conceptualize Earth’s climate and global climate change? and, 2) how does a model-based science sequence promote students’ reasoning about climate? Our results demonstrate that students were able to use EzGCM to obtain relevant data. Their meaningful engagement with EzGCM through comparing simulations representing stable and predicted Earth’s climate, enabled them to predict, hypothesize, and draw causal explanations about the phenomenon of average increase in global surface temperatures.