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The Transformative Experience Questionnaire (TEQ) has previously been used only in formal science learning environments to examine how students' learning experiences extend beyond the classroom into their daily lives. In the present study, an example of how this tool can be useful to assess transformative experiences in an informal learning program is provided. The Lens On Climate Change (LOCC) program combined a place-based approach to learning with creative expression through storytelling, as middle and high school participants created short films about the impacts of climate change in their communities. Our findings suggest the LOCC participants had a transformative experience with regards to their learning about climate change as illustrated in greater post-program TEQ scores over a comparison group of research participants who did not engage in the LOCC program. The program was also transformative for both middle and high school students. Results are discussed within theoretical frameworks for designing informal transformative science learning experiences.

Increasing extreme weather events in a warming world fuel the need for citizens to understand natural hazards and improve community resilience. We especially need to prepare students for these challenges and increase their understanding of hazard resilience. A teacher needs assessment survey was conducted to identify current teaching practices around natural hazards and community resilience, as well as the needs teachers have with respect to training and educational resources on these topics. Using an intentional sampling strategy of school districts in rural and urban communities across Colorado, we surveyed 279 teachers from all disciplines. Almost 70% of teacher survey respondents currently teach about natural hazards, while only about 30% address community resilience. The most common reasons for not teaching about natural hazards or community resilience included a lack of alignment to the subject they are teaching, the absence of these topics in the standards/curriculum, a lack of time, or a lack of personal background knowledge. Teaching practices included lectures, field trips, and class discussions which focused on the science of natural hazards, social aspects (preparedness and impacts), and using current or past events. Science teachers are the most likely to teach about natural hazards and urban teachers are more likely to teach about both hazards and community resilience. Awareness of relevant educational resources was associated with a higher rate of teachers addressing community resilience. Results imply teachers' need for effective and place-conscious educational resources in order to build more resilience in students and thus help communities prepare for natural hazards.

Mentorship has been shown to have a positive influence on mentees but less research is available on the impacts for mentors, particularly those involved in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) outreach. As we work to enhance STEM engagement through outreach programs that include mentoring, understanding the impact on mentors that participate in these programs has implications for program design and offers new avenues for effective mentor engagement. This study explored the impacts of mentoring on undergraduate film and graduate science students who served as mentors in an outreach program for middle and high school youth. In this outreach program, a participant-centered mentorship model was implemented, with mentors supporting students in creating films about local climate change impacts in their communities. The focus was put on interdisciplinary work and the development of communication and relationship building in teams of students and their mentors. Data were collected from the mentors through surveys and interviews. As a result of their participation, mentors experienced professional and personal benefits, such as building teaching and communication skills, developing relationships and networking connections, and personal satisfaction. Several mentors reported high, positive impacts that resulted in changes to their career paths towards STEM education. Mentors who reported moderate or low levels of impact may have had past mentoring experiences that moderated the impact. Based on these findings, we suggest that mentor career and skill development is considered in the development of outreach programs and mentor training to enhance the impact on mentors and their engagement in STEM.

Research Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) programs often introduce students to scientific research and STEM career possibilities. However, the program impact on students and their research skill development is not well understood. In a case study with 10 REU students, the authors used eye-tracking and self-report data to determine student strategies for reading scientific papers and interpreting graphs at the beginning and end of the program. The strategies of REU students and science experts were then compared. The REU students changed their strategies and performed more like experts at posttest. These findings indicate that, during the REU, students acquired expert-like strategies necessary to engage with scientific articles and extract key information from graphs. The study demonstrates that eye-tracking can document skill growth in REU students.

Results from a national needs assessment survey advertised through science teacher networks with the title "Polar Education--Teacher Input Needed" showed that the majority (90%) of teachers that responded are teaching about polar topics or polar regions. We received 508 responses from elementary to post-secondary teachers across the United States. The survey assessed in which classes polar topics are being taught (high school environmental science classes had the highest percentages; [greater than or equal to] 83%), which polar topics are being taught in classes and which topics teachers would like to teach more, what kind of polar education resources teachers are aware of (the majority of respondents, 66%, did not list more than 2 resources), and whether teachers had received professional development on polar topics (81% of teachers had not). Additionally, teachers' knowledge of polar topics was compared to the public's, using item blocks from representative public surveys. Results showed that teacher respondents' knowledge of polar topics consistently exceeded public knowledge. Based on the findings from the survey, we recommend that the polar education community continue to develop educational resources, offer professional development and conduct outreach to K-12 teachers. Specifically, we recommend a focus on: curating classroom-ready authentic data sets based on current polar research, multidisciplinary curricular materials that build on real world geopolitical issues and the historical importance of polar exploration, and curriculum for teaching ocean acidification, ocean ecosystems, and polar teleconnections to global climate.

This article presents a mixed methods investigation of discourse about action on climate change and other socioenvironmental challenges in the context of an informal climate change and film education program. We focused on how action was framed by students, their mentors, and in their co-produced films. Students and films predominantly framed action as something that individuals, including youth, can and should do by making small choices in their daily lives. These choices were framed as being effective when many individuals participate in them. Co-produced films spread messages of hope and educated and motivated others to make similar choices. While the dominant framing was one of individual behavior change, there was some contrasting discourse that framed action as a collective social process or necessary at a more systemic level. We discuss these actions across scales from individual behavior change to collective and system-oriented change in terms of hope, agency, neoliberalism, and justice.

Rural communities are increasingly facing challenges from climate-related natural hazards such as drought, wildfire, and flood. These cascading hazards threaten social, emotional, physical, and economic well-being, and pose unique challenges to rural areas which may already struggle to find enough resources. Yet, rural areas are rich in social capital, creativity, and resilience, and future leaders are learning how to build agency and increase their community's resilience in school settings. Students in Estes Park, Colorado, have experienced major climate-fueled hazards in their lifetimes, surviving the floods in 2013 and the East Troublesome and Cameron Peak wildfires in 2020. At Estes Park Middle School, the Environmental Resilience Team (ERT) is an afterschool group of students who are actively participating in promoting public awareness, mitigation, and policy-making to increase resilience to natural hazards. Supported by the Hazard, Education, Awareness, and Resilience Task Force (HEART Force) Program, a comprehensive curriculum that immerses students in the study of their community's resilience to floods and fires, in conjunction with the Earth Force Environmental Civic Action resources, students and educators gained the tools needed to spearhead community discussions on resilience, all while striving to mitigate and minimize future risks. In this paper, we tell the story of the Environmental Resilience Team's campaign to pass statewide legislation to implement Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Building Codes in high-risk areas. Students visited the Colorado State Capitol, met with their State Senator and Governor to lobby for the passage of the bill. This initiative builds upon years of action projects, including service projects to mitigate fire risk in vulnerable populations within the mountain town of Estes Park and build community education and awareness through the distribution of "go-bags" to community members. By including youth voice in public decision-making and planning for climate resilience, community leaders and policymakers can develop more holistic plans that include multigenerational input. This research is part of a broader study across implementations of HEART Force in several classrooms that showed that the HEART Force program helped students develop a sense of agency and grow in their understanding of community resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examined high school students' perspectives on climate change before and after participation in an informal science education program. During the program, students made a short, place-based film about climate change impacts in their communities. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of student data revealed key themes that illustrate how students characterized climate change before and after developing their films. Following the program, students described climate change as locally-relevant, alarming, and a concern that held increased personal importance to them. They also reported greater confidence in their understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change and indicated a stronger sense of both collective and personal responsibility to take action to address climate change challenges in their communities. The study adds to the existing body of literature that describes how making personally meaningful connections with climate change can inspire a sense of responsibility and agency among students.

The Lens on Climate Change (LOCC) is an informal, place-based science program designed to engage middle and high school students from underserved groups in learning and communicating about impacts of climate change on their communities. This student-driven experience involves identifying a local environmental challenge, researching the topic, and creating a short film about it with the guidance of film and science mentors. The case study presented here provides an in-depth analysis of a small group of Native American high school students whose film depicts a strong connection to place and includes stories about their personal experiences of the impacts of drought on their community. LOCC's focus on the communities where students live was maintained even when students participated in a workshop outside of their home communities. Even in this unique context for a place-based program, the students drew meaningful connections to home and to a critical environmental challenge that impacted their community through their films and filmmaking processes. Follow-up interviews with the students suggested that the LOCC program experience was transformative for them with regard to their personal actions around environmental challenges and their approaches to thinking and communicating about climate change. LOCC's focus on place and storytelling through film helped students find greater personal meaning in the geoscience topics they were learning and may be a useful model for other education programs in geoscience. The alignment of LOCC with components of culturally responsive teaching and future directions for tailoring the program for Indigenous students are discussed.

Science education can build a bridge between research carried out by scientists and relevant learning opportunities for students. The Broader Impact requirements for scientists by funding agencies facilitate this connection. We propose and test a model curriculum development process in which scientists, curriculum developers, and classroom educators work together to scaffold the use of authentic, unprocessed scientific data for high school students. We outline a three-module curriculum structure that facilitates these goals. This curriculum engages students in the collection, description, visualization, and interpretation of data; develops understanding of the nature of science; includes prompts to develop higher-order thinking skills; builds knowledge of regional relevance of climate change in students; uses active learning techniques; and can be easily integrated with the Next Generation Science Standards. The curriculum was reviewed and tested in the classroom. To shed further light on the curriculum development process, we gathered reflection data from the scientists, curriculum developers, and educators. Scientists appreciated the collaborative process in which they contributed their expertise without requiring a large time commitment or strong expertise in science education. The curriculum developers viewed the modular structure as helpful in breaking complicated scientific concepts into teachable steps. Classroom educators appreciated the detailed description and step-by-step instructions to navigate data analysis tools like Excel or Google Earth. Initial classroom implementation of the curriculum by 11 teachers with over 1,100 students showed high levels of interest in the topic and engagement. Further work is needed to assess efficacy of the curriculum through classroom observations and measures of student learning.

Results from a series of surveys describe dimensions of middle and high school science teachers' preparation for and practices around climate science instruction in the classroom. Descriptions are drawn from 877 respondents to four surveys of US middle and high school science teachers from 2009-2011. Most respondents had engaged in self-directed learning or short duration workshops to prepare for climate instruction while a third had received professional development in sustained undergraduate or graduate level courses. Controversy was cited as the top climate education concern in 2011, followed by the need for resources, alignment with standards and needs for professional development. Some respondents perceive the existence or human-attribution of recent climate change to be false, some accept and wish to teach the evidence that the climate is changing due primarily to human activities, and some describe a desire to teach ''both sides'' without describing the motivation. The most commonly used strategy to address controversy and misinformation is to promote learning about the nature of science, evidence, and data. Recommendations for supporting teachers in climate science instruction are made based upon the findings of these studies, the evolution literature, and the Next Generation Science Standards.

Climate literacy is an essential component of a strategy to comprehend and confront the grand challenge of global climate change. However, scientific complexity, societal implications, and political associations make climate change a difficult but important topic to teach. In this paper we report on the results of a survey of undergraduate faculty members on their teaching practices with respect to climate science and the outcomes of a series of undergraduate faculty workshops focused on climate change topics and intended to support faculty members in teaching these topics. Survey results show that undergraduate faculty members place a high priority on teaching climate science because of its relevance to the students with respect to their community, lives, and potential careers. In addition, the survey indicates that climate concepts are taught in a spectrum of undergraduate classes, ranging from geoscience classes to those in the social sciences that address societal impacts and solutions to the problems created by climate change. Results from the survey and workshops indicate there are multiple successful strategies for teaching climate topics, including focusing on solutions, using local contexts, teaching with scientific data, embracing that controversy is an integral part of teaching about climate change, and employing effective communication strategies that can help address controversy and misconceptions. We suggest that undergraduate faculty members need ongoing support in their efforts to effectively teach climate change topics. The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network and On the Cutting Edge projects strive to provide that support through workshops and Web portals that provide access to a variety of educational materials.

In recent years, various climate change education efforts have been launched, including federally (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, etc.) and privately funded projects. In addition, climate literacy and energy literacy frameworks have been developed and deployed, and both have been reviewed and endorsed by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This paper describes a community-based effort to promote climate and energy literacy: the CLEAN Network (originally the Climate Literacy Network). We describe results from a member survey about the importance of the network to the members' professional lives and review the development and position of the network within the larger community of climate and energy literacy stakeholders. The CLEAN Network was first formed in 2008 to support climate literacy efforts, largely through voluntary efforts. It serves as a champion and rudimentary and unfunded backbone support organization, enabling first steps toward establishing the elements necessary for successful collective impact in achieving climate literacy. Among the elements that have been described to be essential for a collective impact, the CLEAN Network most effectively provides continuous communication for the broad community of climate literacy stakeholders. The network enables its professionally diverse members to learn of one another's needs and to begin identifying mutually reinforcing activities that will address the common agenda and shared system of measures (two other key elements of collective impact) once they are established. The CLEAN Network serves as a small champion group that continues to seek input from the larger climate literacy stakeholder community on how a backbone support organization might support and extend their efforts. The next steps in a collective impact approach to climate and energy literacy include defining and forming a backbone support organization to facilitate the development of a shared agenda and a shared system of measures, which has the support of all stakeholders, that is sufficiently funded and can help mobilize funding to scale what works in climate and energy literacy. Such an organization would have collective impact that is commensurate to the challenges and opportunities climate change present to the nation.

Educators seek to develop 21st century skills in the classroom by incorporating educational materials other than textbooks into their lessons, such as digitally available activities, videos, and visualizations. A problem that educators face is that no review process similar to the formal adoption processes used for K-12 textbooks or the college-textbook review process exists for these types of online educational resources. However, educators need authoritative high-quality digital teaching materials. The scientific journal peer-review system offers a well-established model to adapt to the requirements of a peer review of educational materials. In this paper, we review ten review processes developed to evaluate digital geoscience educational resources and focus in detail on a rigorous iterative peer-review process recently developed by the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) project. This process builds upon existing efforts and emphasizes the "curation" of a digital collection that addresses the Essential Principles of Climate Literacy and the Energy Literacy Principles. Providing educators with thoroughly reviewed educational materials is especially important for fast changing, societally important, and sensitive areas such as climate and energy science.

We evaluated influences on the climate change risk perceptions of undergraduate students in an introductory Earth Science course. For this sample, domain-specific content knowledge about climate change was a significant predictor of students' risk perception of climate change while cultural worldviews (individualism, hierarchy) and political orientation were not. These results contrast with previous studies highlighting worldviews as a dominant influence on risk perception. At the beginning of the semester, students' climate change content knowledge was relatively low, with average scores on a 21-item test less than 50%. Post instruction results indicated that students learned climate change science during the course, and their perceptions of risks associated with climate change increased. Unlike most prior research evaluating links between climate change knowledge and risk perception, our measure of content knowledge was a validated assessment specific to climate change. Use of this specific climate knowledge test may be one reason that we detected a relationship between climate knowledge and risk perception whereas most of the previous research has not. Another--possibly complementary--explanation may be a generational shift between our study sample and prior samples. Undergraduates today, having grown up with more exposure to climate change in schools and the media than previous generations, may be diverging from average adults in that learning climate science appears to also increase their perceptions of the risks climate change poses. Undergraduate courses with embedded climate-related activities present an opportunity to both increase climate science knowledge and risk perceptions of future decision makers.

We assessed undergraduates' representations of the greenhouse effect, based on student-generated concept sketches, before and after a 30-min constructivist lesson. Principal component analysis of features in student sketches revealed seven distinct and coherent explanatory models including a new "Molecular Details" model. After the lesson, which described the invisible molecular behaviour of gases, this group (n = 164) produced significantly more expert-like representations of the greenhouse effect, and included fewer novice ideas. The key behaviour that greenhouse gases emit radiation in random directions is new to most students and directly counters common explanations involving reflection and 'trapping' of radiation in the atmosphere. Thus, learning molecular behaviour of greenhouse gases may help students replace non-expert explanatory models. This "Molecular Details" model has not been previously identified, and is unlikely to have emerged from human evaluation of student sketches alone. When teaching the greenhouse effect, we propose that interventions explicitly incorporate greenhouse gas behaviour.

Spatial reasoning is a critical skill in the Geosciences. Using a randomized control study with 592 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory and advanced Geology courses, our data indicates that regular, short interventions throughout an academic semester improve students' spatial thinking skills significantly with a moderate to large effect size when compared to an instruction-as-usual control group. We found evidence for additional gains in students who participated also in hands-on training interventions. We found even larger training effects on students who achieved correct scores of >50% on the practice modules, with gains of almost three-quarter of a standard deviation relative to their baseline scores. Male and female students display significant differences in spatial skills, with males outperforming females. Training resulted in similar magnitudes of improvement in both genders, so we see no evidence that the interventions closed the gender gap. Using the initial performance as a baseline, poor performers' spatial skills appear to improve through practice at the same rate as their peers. We argue that 15.4% of students improve their spatial skills through participation in the training towards a threshold that appears to be critical for participation in STEM careers. On a reflection survey, half of the students reported that they felt their spatial thinking skills improved through their participation, and over a third found the training beneficial for their overall learning in Geology or other classes. We hypothesise that formal training opportunities for spatial reasoning could increase the potential pool of students who successfully enter and succeed in Geoscience careers.

Learning about climate change is tangible when it addresses impacts that can be observed close to home. In this program, sixty-four diverse middle and high school students produced videos about locally relevant climate change topics. Graduate and undergraduate students provided mentorship. The program engaged students in research and learning about climate change, and sparked their interest in science careers. Evaluation results showed that students were highly motivated by the experience, developed a genuine interest in their science topic, learned about the scientific process, and developed twenty-first century skills. The program provided a unique and authentic approach to science learning and communication.

AbstractClimate change education (CCE) plays a critical role in climate empowerment and addressing the challenge of climate change. We present results from the first social network analysis of CCE in the U.S. We surveyed CCE professionals through an established CCE network and wide dissemination from CCE professionals about their interactions with others across 5 dimensions: (1) climate and energy education; (2) climate action, climate empowerment, or community engagement; (3) workforce development in the climate and energy field; (4) diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism; and (5) climate or energy policy. The resulting network analysis shows some cohesiveness, especially for the first two dimensions; however, network cohesiveness could be improved. The findings also show the keystone organizations and brokers across the CCE field. This study provides a foundation for developing targeted strategies to strengthen CCE for improving coordinated and collaborative climate action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent changes in the climate system are mostly due to greenhouse gas emissions through increased energy use by society, which changes the distribution of energy in the Earth system. These changes highlight the importance of energy education. Energy consumption is at the source of and the solution to climate change. However, studies across the US and globally show that students' understanding of energy and the connection between energy and climate is low. The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness (CLEAN, http://cleanet.org) effort supports educators of middle school through undergraduate levels in their teaching about energy topics by providing an online, free collection of peer-reviewed, classroom ready resources that span the entire breadth of energy and climate education. The web portal also provides materials for teachers to learn more about how to teach about energy and climate. A vibrant community supports educators and other stakeholders in their efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]