Integrating Climate and Wildfire Education in the Classroom
Authors: Marquette Danielle 
Published: July 2024

In the United States, even though most parents would like their children to be educated about climate change, and most teachers support including climate change in K-12 curriculum, many schools fail to educate students about the causes, consequences, solutions, and personal connections to climate change. Teaching anthropogenic climate change through the local context is one of the most effective methods of teaching climate change. In Idaho the lengthening fire season and the increasing occurrence of larger, more severe fires is a tangible impact of climate change. Yet students from Idaho and other high wildfire risk states in the western United States report that they received little to no wildfire education at the K-12 level. Surveys indicate that K-12 educators do not teach wildfire or climate change for a variety of reasons including lack of confidence, background knowledge, awareness of resources, and understanding of how it relates to grade level standards and subjects.

This study was designed to investigate the following questions: 1) Do incoming college students from the western United States receive climate change and wildfire education at the K-12 level? 2) What barriers do K-12 educators report regarding teaching about climate change and wildfire? 3) Does a place-based wildfire education unit at the 4th grade level result in demonstrable increases in climate change and wildfire knowledge? 4) Do teachers who have observed the instruction of wildfire education modules report increased perceived content knowledge, confidence, and willingness to teach wildfire?

To assess gaps in K-12 climate change education, and wildfire education, we surveyed Idaho teachers and students to reveal trends in backgrounds, understanding and perceptions of climate change and wildfire education. We surveyed Idaho K-12 educators to assess teachers' perceptions of climate change, climate change education, and hesitations towards teaching climate change. We find that K-12 teachers overwhelmingly support climate change curriculum, but often do not believe that climate change is related to the subjects they teach and do not feel prepared to teach the subject themselves.

We surveyed 100 level courses (2019, 2021, and 2022) at Boise State University to assess incoming college students' backgrounds in climate change (n=298). We find that 51% of these students had one or more classes that covered climate change in their K-12 education. Idaho students reported the lowest rate of climate change education (44%). We surveyed two of these same university courses (2021 & 2022) at Boise State University to assess incoming college students’ backgrounds in wildfire education (n=201). Although most students attended high school in fire-prone areas of the western United States, the majority of students received little to no wildfire education.

We develop and implement four place-based wildfire educational lessons for K-12 classrooms (https://sites.google.com/boisestate.edu/wildfire-unit/home), and tested the lessons in five different fourth grade classrooms located in southwest Idaho. We gave the students pre and post lesson assessments to measure the effectiveness of each lesson; these lessons were taught to classes with the classroom teacher observing. We surveyed teachers before and after completion of the unit’s instruction to measure their perceived content knowledge, understanding, confidence, and willingness to teach wildfire on their own. While our sample size for a paired analysis of teacher surveys was low (n=7), we found that teachers reported an increase in content knowledge, confidence and willingness to teach about wildfire after observing these lessons being taught. The results were compared for the demographics of urban and rural schools. We hypothesized that students from higher wildfire risk areas might test higher on background (pre-assessment) wildfire knowledge. Three of the schools are categorized as rural and two are categorized as urban, and all rural schools are considered to be in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Two of the rural schools are located within forested, high wildfire risk areas, and one rural school is located in an agricultural area, adjacent to rangelands.

We find that students from rural schools scored lower on their pre-assessments, but had greater improvement between the pre and post-assessments than students from urban schools. A paired t-test of pre and post assessments indicates a statistically significant improvement in student knowledge for lessons 1, 2, and 4 (p lt; 0.001), but not for lesson 3 (p = 0.058). Cohens d effect sizes for each lesson were large for lesson 1 (1.4), medium for lesson 2 (0.6), small for lesson 3 (0.3), and large for lesson 4 (1.2).

This study demonstrates that these K-12 wildfire modules provide both a needed and successful intervention, which can better prepare students to address challenges presented by wildfire and climate change in communities in the western United States.