COS 81-3 - Localizing Climate Change: A undergraduate student classroom intervention

Abstract: Learning about climate change as a distant problem compromises the efficacy of instruction. Researchers suggest making instruction more personally relevant by providing examples of how climate change directly impacts students or their local environment. This approach may lower the perceived psychological distance between the students and climate change. Our previous research suggests that students’ ability to see climate change across multiple spatial scales is an important factor in predicting a student’s ability to see and discuss climate change within their state. Using these findings, we created a climate change classroom intervention designed to 1) lower a student’s psychological distance to climate change across spatial and social scales, 2) make localized climate change more personally relevant to our student population, 3) foster “reseeing” of climate change effects in our students’ local environments, and 4) expand our students’ perception of how climate change affects their communities. Our research questions include: RQ1) Do we see a change in undergraduate biology students’ spatial and social psychological distance (PD) associated with climate change following a classroom intervention? RQ2) What factors (political party, season of data collection, etc.) contribute to differences in students’ spatial and social PD?



We used convenience sampling to recruit six undergraduate biology instructors from three universities in Colorado, Georgia, and North Carolina to implement our intervention during the fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters. To measure the efficacy of our intervention, we administered a survey that contained several instruments and open-response questions to measure students’ recognition and psychological distance of climate change pre- and post-intervention. We used descriptive statistics and regression modeling to determine whether our intervention leads to a reduction in students' spatial and social PD (RQ1) and to determine what other factors (gender, political party, season of data collection, etc.) contribute to any differences in students’ spatial and social PD (RQ2). We found that students' psychological distance to climate change decreased after participating in our classroom intervention. Our intervention is available to undergraduate ecology educators seeking to foster their students’ awareness of local climate change through a meaningful and personal classroom experience.