This study aimed to examine the educational effects of climate change instruction on high school students’ climate emotions and environmental literacy and to investigate how these changes differ by gender. The participants were 108 first-year studen...
This study aimed to examine the educational effects of climate change instruction on high school students’ climate emotions and environmental literacy and to investigate how these changes differ by gender. The participants were 108 first-year students from a general high school located in Miryang, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea. Climate emotion (ICE) and environmental literacy questionnaires were administered before and after the climate change instruction. The collected data were analyzed using paired-sample t-tests, correlation analysis, gender comparisons, and heatmap-based structural analysis.
The results showed statistically significant increases in climate enthusiasm, climate guilt, climate sadness, and climate contempt after the instruction, indicating that students came to perceive climate change not merely as a cognitive issue but as a socially meaningful problem with personal and moral significance. Furthermore, correlation structure analysis revealed that students’ climate emotion system was organized into two clusters: a problem-engaged emotion group (climate anger, enthusiasm, anxiety, sadness, guilt) and an avoidant–defensive emotion group (contempt, helplessness, isolation). After the instruction, this structure was reorganized into a more integrated and systematic emotion network.
In terms of environmental literacy, significant improvements were observed in attitudes, skills, action, and participation, with the largest gains found in action and participation. Gender analysis showed that male students exhibited improvement mainly in the action domain, whereas female students demonstrated development across all domains—attitudes, skills, action, and participation. These findings suggest that climate change instruction establishes an emotion-based learning structure that connects students’ emotions and behaviors, and that the developmental pathways of this structure differ according to gender characteristics.
This study empirically demonstrates that climate change education functions as a core educational domain that shapes both students’ emotional structures and environmental literacy beyond mere knowledge acquisition, and it highlights the necessity of advancing school climate education through instructional designs that reflect emotion-based learning and gender-responsive approaches.