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Student understanding of climate change is an active and growing area of research, but little research has documented undergraduate students’ knowledge about the biotic impacts of climate change. Here, we address this literature gap by presenting the Inventory of Biotic Climate Literacy (IBCL), a concept inventory developed to assess undergraduate biology student knowledge of how climate change impacts living things. We developed the IBCL through literature review, student and expert interviews, student field tests, and expert review. We implemented two large nationwide field tests and conducted multiple psychometric analyses on these datasets. These analyses resulted in a final tool of 30 items measuring 16 constructs related to the biotic impacts of climate change. We discovered that the final IBCL does not represent a single, simple construct but rather the complicated and interactive concepts that comprise this topic. We suggest that sum scores are still a valuable measure, as certain groups (upperclassmen and politically liberal individuals) scored significantly higher. We also found value in analyzing individual student performance on the IBCL by developing student profiles. The IBCL represents an important tool in assessing student understanding of the complex and growing problem of climate change and its impact on the living world. 

Undergraduate summer field programs are valuable experiences that can foster or reduce students’ self-efficacy, an important factor in students’ success and retention in geoscience. Growing research findings show that science field experiences can be hostile and unwelcoming to students with marginalized identities, which may negatively impact their self-efficacy in geoscience, a discipline with a dearth of students from underrepresented, marginalized identities. We conducted an interpretive qualitative study examining how summer geoscience field programs affected two undergraduate, marginalized students’ self-efficacy. Adding to existing theoretical explanations of self-efficacy, we identified three types of self-efficacy impacted positively and negatively by geoscience field experiences: academic, physical, and social self-efficacy. We developed a nuanced understanding of the specific field experiences that influenced the ‘ups and downs’ of students’ self-efficacy and, ultimately, their intent in continuing to pursue a geoscience education or career. Despite negative experiences, including gender discrimination, crude sexual jokes, and a lack of belonging, the students described their intent to persist in geoscience. Our findings can assist geoscience educators (and others in field-based sciences) to consider experiences that support and hinder marginalized students’ self-efficacy. Also, our findings can guide efforts to improve geoscience field programs to create more inclusive environments. 

The full extent of gender discrimination in university settings remains uncertain. More research is needed to understand the scope of gender discrimination experiences in universities and to develop effective prevention approaches. However, Title IX and Institutional Review Board policies may hinder researchers’ abilities to study gender discrimination in university settings. In this paper, we describe our experience working with the Institutional Review Board and Title IX offices to obtain approval for researching gender discrimination in university settings. We provide recommendations for how universities can enable gender discrimination research and follow Title IX policies. 

Abstract Climate change is a critical environmental issue and is a recommended core concept in the Ecological Society of America’s 4‐Dimensional Ecology Education framework. Limited work describes K‐12 students’ conceptions of the biotic impacts of climate change, yet research is lacking to explore undergraduate students’ conceptions on this topic. Our goal was to describe undergraduate student conceptions of the biotic outcomes of climate change, and characterize how these student conceptions of animal responses to climate change align with accepted scientific ideas. We used an interpretive qualitative research design and interviewed 13 undergraduate students who were enrolled in either an introductory biology or general ecology course. Through two independent codings of the same dataset, we separately addressed each of our research goals. Prior to this study, we identified three general biotic outcomes from climate change, which were confirmed by outside experts: changes to an animal’s Growth and Survival, their Reproduction, or their Distribution. Our student interviewees as a whole mentioned all three of these outcomes, and most individuals mentioned all three in their responses. Additionally, we found that most student ideas were aligned with Scientific conceptions, while a third of student ideas contained some scientific conceptions but were incomplete. Only a small percent of conceptions voiced in our sample were identified as alternative conceptions that did not align with accepted scientific ideas. These findings are important for educators who teach climate change, as they suggest that undergraduate students come to our classes with productive resources; however, our findings also identify concepts where students may struggle or enter classrooms with a more incomplete understanding.