More Insights from the Use of a Climate Concept Inventory in University Classrooms

An existing, reliable, and validated climate concept inventory (CCI; Aksit et al., 2017; Libarkin et al., 2018) is given to students at the beginning and end of the semester in two climate-focused courses at a large R1 university in order to measure student learning gains as well as determine if students have any misconceptions and whether they are corrected throughout the semester. Scores from the CCIs given at the beginning and end of the semester are compared between and within courses to determine whether there are differences and if so, whether they are differentiated by grade level (100 v. 400/500) or increased by learning throughout the semester. Since each item on the CCI is paired with a specific topic covered and assessed in each course, the results from this study can be used to make suggestions for best teaching practices of climate content at the university level.