Developing an Educational Module on the Impacts of Climate Change on Puerto Rico and its Inhabitants An Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) to be submitted to the Faculty of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science SUBMITTED BY: PRINCESA CLOUTIER MICHAEL GAGLIANO EMMA RAYMOND SUBMITTED TO: PROJECT ADVISORS: PROF. LAUREN MATHEWS, WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE PROF. TINA-MARIE RANALLI, WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE PROJECT LIAISON: PEDRO RÍOS, UNITED STATES FOREST SERVICE Abstract Small islands like the island of Puerto Rico are susceptible to the negative effects of anthropogenic climate change. Because of this, it is important that climate change education is developed and implemented on the island so that the population, especially its youth, can adequately adapt to climate change. The goal of this project was to develop effective lessons that could be used to teach middle school students in Río Grande, Puerto Rico about the immediate and long-term effects of climate change. These lessons were designed to be relevant to the students by providing evidence and examples of climate change in the island of Puerto Rico. Through the use of interviews with experts on climate change, members of environmental education initiatives, and teachers, we were able to determine what material to incorporate into our lessons and how to best deliver it. To analyze the effectiveness of our lessons we tested our lesson on a ninth grade class and utilized a pre-test and a post-test as a method of evaluation. These tests asked questions based on the learning objectives covered in the lessons, and were then compared using statistical analysis. The analysis showed a significant increase in understanding climate change based on the information provided in the lessons. Additional evaluations suggested that the lessons required further development to incite a greater increase of student knowledge on climate change. We revised the lessons, and recommend that they be tested further and in different settings. Additionally, we developed supplemental lesson outlines to deepen student understanding of climate change topics that are relevant to Puerto Rico. We recommend that these outlines be further developed and tested so that they may encourage climate change education and help pave the way to having a more environmentally conscientious Puerto Rican youth. pg. ii “Education is the most powerful weapon we have to change the world.” -Nelson Mandela pg. iii Executive Summary Background Throughout the world, it is apparent that anthropogenic climate change is having more and more adverse effects on the environment and on society as a whole. These effects are varied, and can range from the destruction of coral reefs and other marine ecosystems to increased instances of water-associated diseases such as malaria, cholera, dengue, and viral encephalitis (Boelee et al., 2012; McMichael et al, 2006). In the Caribbean, the effects of climate change are more tangible and observable, as the region is comprised of small islands, which will be impacted by even the most minute effects of climate change, when compared to a large-scale continental region of the world. Specifically, the Caribbean will face rising sea levels, coastal erosion, habitat shifts, and changing precipation patterns (Nurse et al., 2014). In Puerto Rico, these effects are already apparent, and include, among others, the loss of coastal regions and changes in precipitation. The island’s various ecosystems are all vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. El Yunque National Forest (EYNF) is one such ecosystem that is currently experiencing the effects of climate change, such as erosion, habitat shifts, and species endangerment. As a result, the island has seen the development of several initiatives and legislative changes to combat this issue. One of the most imperative aspects of this devlopement is the education of the public on the causes and effects of climate change. It is especially imperative that the Puerto Rican youth are educated, as they are the future decision makers of the island. Through education, effective adaptations to climate change can be made by the public, which can allow for a more sustainable lifestyle and, ideally, the prevention of more severe effects of climate change. Methodology and Results The goal of this project was to develop an educational module for middle school students of Río Grande, Puerto Rico, which is a city just outside of El Yunque National Forest. This educational module was intended as the first step towards the development of a climate change curriculum to be administered by our sponsor, the United States Forest Service (USFS). This curriculum would be able to be used by teachers and other environmental education groups, and would include material that focused in particular on the region. To achieve this project goal, our team developed the following project objectives: pg. iv 1. Identify the main concepts and concerns with respect to climate change in Puerto Rico. 2. Determine the best way to educate middle school students in Río Grande 3. Create an educational module for the area and our targeted students 4. Evaluate the effectiveness of our developed learning unit and revise as necessary. Our sponsor selected a local middle school for our team to use as a resource for our last three objectives. This school, the Carmen L. Feliciano Carreras del Sector Palmer Middle School, is a Spanish language middle school serving grades seven through nine, and is just ten minutes from El Yunque, in the city of Río Grande. More specifically, we were paired with a ninth-grade class in this school. The entire class was also a participant of an environmental youth initiative known as 4-H. The school integrates extracurricular activities with electives instead of having them after school. Therefore, the class participated in the 4-H organization primarily as an integration with their visual arts elective. As members of 4-H, the class often took field trips to El Yunque, and had already formed a strong relationship with our sponsor. This first objective was to identify what concepts and concerns that experts in various fields related to climate change were aware of. Thes experts included technicians and managers associated with the USFS, professors at the University of Puerto Rico, as well as participants in various environmental education initiatives. Through interviews with these people we were able to determine what the content of our lessons should be and what kinds of activities and topics had been successful in similar initiatives. We received a general consensus from these interviews that the Puerto Rican public was generally unaware of, and lack of concern about, climate change. This was inclusive of the youth that our lessons were to be geared towards. As such, we were frequently advised to make our lessons introductory, to start the process of emerging students into the topic of climate change, but also relatable by providing local examples in order to drive the point home and emphasize the importance of the topic in a manner that would make the students care. To understand exactly how we would develop our lesson plans, we went to the school in which we would be testing the lessons to learn more about the classroom structure of the school itself. We met objective 2 in two parts: classroom observations and teacher interviews. In our classroom observations, we noted that lectures were conducted in Spanish, but classroom pg. v materials, such as activities and informative posters, were often in English. We took this to denote that there was at least some understanding of and exposure to English amongst the students, allowing us to implement the use of graphs and figures in English as needed in our lessons. We also observed that the time in class was a mixture of lecture and interactive group/class activities, which gave us the flexibility to include both in our lesson. We interviewed three teachers to further our understanding of the school’s academic structure. These interviewees consisted of a mathematics teacher, a general science teacher, and a visual arts teacher. We received a wide variety of information that helped guide our lesson plan development. This included how typical classes were structured in the school, how the teachers plan their lessons, and the integration of climate change and the environment into the class material. Once we understood what topics we were going to include in our lessons, as well as how to execute them, we began the development of our educational module (objective 3). We utilized background research on creating a curriculum and general pedagogy in the development of our lesson plans. We first created 7 learning objectives that we intended to be achieved by our two lessons, such as “Students will be able to identify sources of CO2 emissions.” We created activities, homework assignments, discussion questions and diagrams to address these learning objectives. In the first lesson, we covered topics such as the greenhouse effect, the different greenhouse gases, the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures, the carbon cycle, and sources of carbon dioxide emissions. The impacts of climate change such as rising sea levels, changes in precipitation patterns, and changing conditions for plants and animals were discussed in detail in our second lesson. We developed a PowerPoint presentation in order to display the graphs and diagrams of our lesson. In addition, we created student worksheets that included these same diagrams and graphs for students to complete and materials for the activities of our lesson. In order to make our lesson easier to use, we wrote an instructor’s guide to teaching each facet of our lessons with extensive explanations of the many complex concepts that were incorporated in our lesson. Lastly, we translated all the written components of our lesson to Spanish to increase the usability of our lesson.