Climate Literacy in Education

ISSN: 2836-4546

Climate Literacy in Education is a pocket journal publishing short, practical, teacher-oriented content on all aspects of climate literacy education at all grade levels and across all subject areas (primarily preK-16, but including teacher education and professional development).

Call for submissions for Special Issue 4.4: Teaching Climate Change: A Call for Innovative Assessment Tools and Practices

In classrooms today, students are making sense of climate change as a complex, lived reality—one that invites understanding, reflection, and response. Educators across disciplines and grade levels are, in turn, increasingly committed to developing students’ climate literacy—their ability to understand climate systems, evaluate evidence, consider social and ethical dimensions, and engage thoughtfully in decision-making and action. In PreK–12 settings, teachers are developing powerful ways to engage students with climate-related topics through science investigations, climate literature studies, interdisciplinary projects, civic inquiry, and community-connected learning. Yet even as these instructional approaches continue to expand, questions about assessment remain open and pressing. The challenge now lies in designing evaluations of learning that reflect climate literacy not only as a body of scientific knowledge, but as a framework for critical thinking and social engagement across the entire curriculum.

Traditional assessments of learning often privilege discrete content knowledge and decontextualized skills. Climate literacy, however, calls for a broader set of competencies, including the ability to evaluate evidence, reason across disciplines, consider social and ethical dimensions, navigate uncertainty, and imagine responses to complex, real-world challenges. How can assessment practices begin to address these aims? What kinds of tasks and evidence can capture students’ thinking, growth, and emerging sense of agency? Answering these questions requires a shift toward interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches—assessments that are not only responsive and context-sensitive but deeply aligned with the transformative goals of climate education.

For this special issue of Climate Literacy in Education, we invite educators to reflect on a shared question:

What might a meaningful, fair, and useful assessment of climate literacy look like in PreK–12 classrooms?

We seek contributions that examine climate literacy assessment from multiple perspectives and educational contexts. Submissions may be conceptual, design-oriented, empirical, or reflective in nature. We are particularly interested in work that pushes beyond conventional testing formats and explores new ways of understanding and documenting evidence of student learning.

Read the full CfP here.