ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1637522
Assessing Climate Literacy in Secondary Schools: Development and Validation of an Interdisciplinary Competence Test
Provisionally accepted
Monika Martin1*
Magdalena Stadler1
Künsting Josef1
Martin Schwichow1
Roman Asshoff2Ute Bender1Franziska Birke1Astrid Carrapatoso1Anne-Marie Grundmeier1Christian Höger3Stephan Schuler4Jennifer Stemmann1
Werner Rieß1- 1Research Center for Climate Change Education and Education for Sustainable Development, Freiburg University of Education, Freiburg, Germany
- 2Centre of Biology Education, University of Münster, Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
- 3Institute for Religious Education, Lucerne, Switzerland
- 4Department of Geography, Ludwigsburg University of Education, Ludwigsburg, Germany
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A key goal of Climate Change Education (CCE) in schools is promoting climate literacy in students, that is, equipping them with the skills needed to engage in climate-related discourse and actions in an informed way. To determine whether CCE achieves this goal, comprehensive assessment is essential. However, existing assessment instruments focus narrowly on factual scientific knowledge of climate change and offer limited insight into students' broader climate literacy. This study presents the development of an interdisciplinary climate literacy test for secondary students, integrating perspectives from nine school subjects across the natural sciences, social sciences, technology, and the humanities. The development process involved a cognitive pretest (N = 20), two pilot studies (N1 = 353, N2 = 313), a teacher survey (N = 36), and a validation study (N = 825). We provide a validity argument supporting interpretation of the test score as a meaningful measure of CCE outcomes in secondary education. The test difficulty is suited for 9 th -grade students (approximately 15 years old) across all school types in Germany. Empirical results support the theoretically derived fourdimensional structure of climate literacy, covering the four competence facets of (1) Dealing with content knowledge, (2) Knowledge generation and evaluation, (3) Information and communication, and (4) Normative evaluation. Correlations with external variables suggest that the test captures a school-related competence that is relevant to students' everyday lives. We propose using the developed climate literacy test to evaluate CCE efforts comprehensively and thus enabling development of targeted interventions.
Keywords: Climate literacy, Competence assessment, Secondary education, Interdisciplinary, Test Development, Rasch analysis
Received: 29 May 2025; Accepted: 22 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Martin, Stadler, Josef, Schwichow, Asshoff, Bender, Birke, Carrapatoso, Grundmeier, Höger, Schuler, Stemmann and Rieß. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Monika Martin, Research Center for Climate Change Education and Education for Sustainable Development, Freiburg University of Education, Freiburg, Germany
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