A Narrative Approach to Building Computational Capacity in Professional Masters Students

Abstract:

With the growing recognition of the cascading consequences of climate change, there is an increasing demand for work-ready professionals with skills in Climate Change Impact Assessment (CCIA). Professional Masters programs are designed to meet this type of demand; to help students to rapidly transition from undergraduate learners to the skilled labour force; however, such programs present a unique challenge for instructors to balance conceptual content with continually-evolving and often technical real-world application, and to support students to adapt to the accelerated pace of technical skills development required in many of the courses. This is particularly true of the data-intensive discipline of CCIA. Consequently, past approaches to teaching CCIA have opted to circumvent the technical aspects of the field, leading to lack of methodological transparency and leaving students ill-equipped to enter the work-force.

To facilitate improved transparency and technical skill-building in CCIA, we have developed a new, open-source (CC-BY-SA 4.0) lab manual entitled Climate Change Impact Assessment: A practical walk-through, presenting a series of step-by-step, coherently narrated, open-source Python labs aimed at building students' computational capacity and confidence, while providing foundational knowledge in CCIA and the opportunity to interact with state-of-the-art methods and data.

We employed start-of-term and end-of-term surveys to assess changes in CCIA knowledge, knowledge of Python and related libraries, and student confidence in CCIA and coding. We found statistically significant improvements in answer accuracy for CCIA- and Python-related questions. Students also indicated a statistically significant increase in their confidence (on a scale from 1 to 5) in their abilities to perform technical tasks in CCIA.

We encourage fellow instructors in CCIA to borrow from, contribute to, and otherwise remix the lab manual.