Associate Professor University of Northern Colorado, Colorado, United States
Background/Question/Methods
Climate change is an existential threat to all life on earth; the documented impacts of climate change on living systems are extensive and of a devastating scale. ESA’s 4DEE encourages undergraduate students and their educators to better understand and address this global issue. However, tools to effectively assess student knowledge of the biotic outcomes of climate change are lacking. We previously built a new framework, the BIC4 (Biotic Impacts of Climate Change Core Concepts), related to 4DEE to expand on climate topics. In this presentation, we present preliminary items of a concept inventory based on the BIC4 and discuss student responses that reveal common student misunderstandings of this topic. We developed the Inventory of Biotic Climate Literacy (IBCL) pilot version, using the BIC4 framework and hours of interviews of both students and experts. This first version, a 17-item survey, is intended to document students’ existing knowledge surrounding the ways in which climate change will impact living things. We administered this survey Fall 2021 in introductory biology and ecology courses across 14 US institutions, including public and private institutions, from baccalaureate-only to R1 research institutions.
Results/Conclusions
Of our 843 undergraduate respondents, a majority of them had taken only one (40%) or no (13%) biology courses prior to the given semester. We also found most of our participants (99%) accept that climate change is occurring, so where responses are incorrect, we are confident that this is due to a lack of understanding, not a rejection of the premise. In this talk, we will discuss the 9 items that focus narrowly on scale aspects of climate change, distinguishing the biotic impacts in response to climate change as a unique type of disturbance (e.g. it is not a discrete event, but occurs continuously over time). For example, on two of these items, we found 62% and 53% of students correctly understood the scale of climate change as an unceasing, gradual disturbance impacting biotic systems. Alternatively, many students believed increased temperatures results in no impact on species until a “critical point,” spurring a threshold response, or were unable to discriminate the scale of a fire disturbance from that of climate change. These findings help us better direct instructional efforts to overcome misconceptions of the biotic impacts of climate change.
