NEW RESOURCES FOR CLIMATE LITERACY INSTRUCTION AND ASSESSMENT AT THE INTRODUCTORY UNIVERSITY LEVEL

The Climate Literacy in Undergraduate Education (CLUE) project seeks to improve climate, global climate change, and microclimate literacy among general education university students. The central innovation of this 3-academic year (2023-2026) National Science Foundation IUSE project is the collection and analysis by individual students of personal temperature and humidity data. This data is collected with wearable sensors over a two-day interval. However, to further the project’s broad literacy goal, 6 videos and related assessment prompts have been created. Videos range in length from 7 min:12 sec to 14 min:27 sec, and there are 7-17 multiple choice, true/false, and matching prompts for each video. The topics are energy & climate, the global geography of climate, microclimates, climate change basics, anthropogenic climate change, and the effects of climate change. Each video begins with a question or questions and ends with answers to the questions. Videos and related assessment prompts have been used both inside and outside introductory Earth Science and Physical Geography classrooms at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Each video is based on a slide deck and the final slide in each slide deck includes discussion prompts. In addition to providing for classroom discussion, these prompts potentially provide for written assessment and assessment through sketching. All of these materials are already available to instructors in draft form upon request, and they will be available to instructors through a public website upon completion of the project.