Implementation of a Climate Decision Support System in an Undergraduate Weather and Climate Classroom

Climate education needs to include real world scenarios actionable items to resonate with those pupils who are learning about climate change (Anderson 2012). For this project, a Decision Support System (DSS) was used in an undergraduate classroom lab setting to show how endangered species will be impacted by climatic changes in the future. This website known as Climate Analysis and Visualization for the Assessment of Species Status (CAnVAS) was used in a Weather and Climate course lab section at a large public University in the Southern U.S. CAnVAS was created by the State Climate Office of North Carolina (SCONC). An active learning lab was developed which provided students guidance on how to navigate the website and then provided an opportunity to navigate the website independently. Students were tasked with making observations of how species may be impacted when different climate variables were manipulated on the web tool. A pre and post assessment was conducted to assess knowledge gains of students across the semester around climate change impacts to endangered species. A pilot iteration of this study was conducted in Fall 2021 and subsequent iterations have occurred in Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 semesters. The research questions that guide this project include: (1) How do undergraduate students interact with the navigational CAnVAS website? (2) What do undergraduate students deem as easy versus difficult portions of CAnVAS to understand? (3) How did student content knowledge change throughout the semester? This poster will show results from the pre and post assessment as well as lab results. The end goal of the project is to create, implement, and evaluate an active learning undergraduate classroom lab that incorporates a real-world decision support system and provides students with insights to how endangered species are impacted by climatic changes through evidence-based reasoning and use of climate science visualizations.