23–26 Sept 2025
Charité Campus Mitte
Europe/Berlin timezone

Development and validation of a questionnaire to measure Climate Change Literacy in schoolchildren

24 Sept 2025, 12:30
1h
CharitéCrossOver/0-0 - Atrium (Virchowweg 6)

CharitéCrossOver/0-0 - Atrium

Virchowweg 6

300
Poster Posters Day 1 (24 September) Posters day 1

Speaker

Marie Caroline Vermund (University of Copenhagen)

Description

Authors: Marie Caroline Vermund (University of Copenhagen), Glen Nielsen (University of Copenhagen), Peter Elsborg (Center for Clinical Research and Prevention, Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital)

Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared climate change as one of the greatest health threats to humanity. Current trajectories in climate change thus indicate that chil-dren of today, regardless of their residence, face a future in which they will need to be prepared to navigate the increasingly complex challenges related to climate change. This emphasizes a need for future generations to be willing, able, and motivated to engage in individual and socie-tal actions to mitigate climate change. Enhancing children’s climate change literacy could affect the whole process from individual awareness to public engagement. There is thus a growing call for educational activities to fully enable schoolchildren to acquire the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes needed to contribute effectively to the mitigation and adaptation of climate change. Scales to measure related constructs exist, such as environmental attitudes or climate knowledge. However, to our knowledge, there exists no validated survey integrating a holistic range of ele-ments specific to children’s climate change literacy.
Purpose: We aim to move beyond constructs assessing climate change knowledge or climate change attitudes by itself and develop and validate a holistic and age-appropriate instrument to measure all domains of climate change literacy in schoolchildren between 9 and 12 years.
Methods: An electronic survey was developed, and pilot tested on convenience sample of the target group. The questionnaire was then administered to a large sample of Danish schoolchil-dren aged 9 to 12 years. Tests of dimensionality, reliability and validity will be performed.
Ex-pected results: We aim to contribute with a validated survey measuring a broad range of dimen-sions relevant to climate change literacy in children aged 9 to 12 in a Danish context. The study will thus provide a new and needed tool to measure children’s climate change literacy. Preliminary findings will be presented and discussed.

Conflict of interest N/A

Author

Marie Caroline Vermund (University of Copenhagen)

Co-authors

Mr Glen Nielsen (University of Copenhagen) Mr Peter Elsborg (Center for Clinical Research and Prevention, Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital)

Presentation materials

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