Teaching modules for estimating climate change impacts in economics courses using computational guided inquiry

Abstract

The authors of this article introduce two teaching modules that aim to increase climate literacy and active learning in undergraduate economics courses through the incorporation of real-world data and modeling. These modules are based on the concept of computational guided inquiry (CGI), which combines a guided inquiry approach within a computational framework, such as Excel. In one module, students estimate and graph expected marginal damages due to regional sea level rise for various polar ice melt scenarios. In the second module, students partially replicate a journal article estimating the total economic value of ecosystem services in the Arctic. These modules have been used in urban, environmental, and climate change economics courses, and are ready to be implemented with minimal upfront cost to instructors.

Keywords:

• active learning
• climate change
• economic modeling
• environmental economics
• guided inquiry
• Microsoft Excel
• real-world data
• urban and regional economics

JEL CODE:

• A2

Notes

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Amy Ryken for her guidance and assistance with the grounded theory analysis.

Notes

1 United Nations Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon made this statement in his speech at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali in 2007.

2 Climate Central is a nonprofit organization that conducts research on climate change impacts due to sea level rise and flooding in coastal cities. Web site: https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/

3 The format of the original CGI modules the students completed in this study was in Microsoft Word with an accompanying Excel spreadsheet. They have since been reformatted to PowerPoint slides to improve the user interface. The main content and text of the modules remain the same.

4 Among the three instructors who implemented the sea level rise module, one completed it over two 50-minute class periods, another did it in one full 80-minute class, and the third completed it during one 2-hour class.

5 SERC refers to the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College, and is home to a large collection of educational resources. Web site: https://serc.carleton.edu/penguin/

6 Articles on sea level rise and its impacts are becoming more and more common in the news. For example, a quick news search on “sea level rise” finds a number of articles, including “$50 billion worth of Bay Area homes at risk of rising seas by 2050, says report” from The Mercury News on July 31, 2019, and “Record Heat Threatens Greenland’s Ice Sheet” from the Pacific Standard on July 30, 2019.

7 House price data comes from ESRI’s ArcGIS interactive Web site with 2012 data for USA median home values. Web site: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?useExisting=1&layers=8abd47c2988d497a8f24ad89180980c8

8 The “testability” assessment was conducted for all modules developed for the NSF project. The total sample size of student questions from all modules implemented in both science and economics courses is 666.

9 The students completed a CGI module on rovibrational waves that was part of a course in atmospheric chemistry. Among the various criteria considered for evaluating the questions from this module, including sophistication, clarity, engagement, and synthesis, testability was the only one that showed a statistically significant difference between pre- and post-question scores after a subset of the questions was ranked by three different evaluators.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 271033.