Abstract:

Climate Change is the most important threat to our species and all living creatures on Earth. The rapid increase in average temperatures throughout the planet, rising sea level and most frequent climate extremes are developing in a planetary crisis that must be addressed. Among the several strategies that need to be implemented to deal with this issue, is to establish an effective educational strategy to help the communities to be prepared for Climate Change.

In the educational framework, the concept of competence is established as the ability to respond to complex demands and carry out various tasks in an appropriate manner, involving a combination of practical skills, knowledge, motivation, ethical values, attitudes, emotions, and other social and behavioral components that are mobilized together to achieve effective action. Therefore, the concept of competence provides a framework to develop understanding, awareness and abilities related to Climate Change through education, based on three complementary dimensions: knowledge, abilities and attitudes. This makes that Climate Change Competence has been proposed as a comprehensive approach to include Climate Change in the curriculum.

In this work, we describe three eLearning teacher training courses designed to achieve Climate Change Competence and explain how data mining tools can be used to study the development of this competence in primary and secondary teachers. We also show how these courses can be used to obtain first-hand educational data that could be useful for designing and implementing educational strategies in order to increase and develop Climate Change Education through the curriculum.

The results of a validated survey taken for more than three hundred teachers that have taken the courses are also presented, showing that more than 90% of them agree with the need to continue including Climate Change in the curriculum, and they also agree that the best way to do this is through educational competences (around 90%). The obtained results are very valuable as most of the sample, being Primary and Secondary teachers, has a very high knowledge about the Spanish official curricula and they can be taken into account in order to “Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning”, which is a target of one of the Sustainable Development Goals promoted by the United Nations.

Keywords:

Climate Change, Competence, Teachers Education, Educational data mining.