While many high quality, creative climate change education products and approaches have been developed in recent years, it is not well understood which approaches are most effective, and in particular, with minority student populations. Therefore, the overall thrust of the proposed project is the evaluation of the effectiveness of different climate change education approaches for high school student and community college students. The primary objective of the proposed work is to advance the understanding of how to effectively teach global climate change concepts using NASA data. The following three approaches will be studied: (1) 3D computer game using NASA data, (2) 3D Visualization using NASA data, and (3) undergraduate student research experiences involving the use of NASA data. Over a 2.5-year period, qualitative and quantitative student evaluation data will be collected on hundreds of students with a high percentage of them being from minority populations.

The effectiveness of the three climate change education approaches will be determined in terms of their effect on student understanding of climate change issues, student understanding of climate change science content knowledge, interest in learning more about climate change science and issues, and college degree enrollment/transfer decisions in climate related disciplines. These results will be important for informing future investments in climate change education by NASA and other agencies. They will also be important for determining how most effectively to develop a climate literate citizenry. The project will leverage the resources available from current and past work of the NOAA Interdisciplinary Scientific Environmental Technology Cooperative Science Center (ISETCSC) that is led by North Carolina A&T State University (NCAT) with six academic partners serving minority students; the NOAA Games, Data Visualizations, and Virtual Worlds Group at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory; NASA funded NCAT research experiences for K-12 teachers and curriculum development projects; presentations developed for Magic Planet and Science-on-a-Sphere by numerous groups and grants across the world; the NASA NIA Langley professor program; and the NSF Climate Literacy Partnership in the Southeast (CPLiPSE).