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Guiding Students towards an Understanding of Climate Change through a Teaching–Learning Sequence

In this paper, we put forward a proposal for the design and the evaluation of teaching–learning sequences (TLSs) on the greenhouse effect (GHE), relying on the educational reconstruction model (MER). The first design, which starts from a critical analysis of textbook treatments of the GHE, is followed by a cyclic, recursive process, which consists of theoretical reflection, conceptual analysis, design, and test of a sequence. At each iteration, the analysis of the students’ learning progression provided relevant information for addressing the persistent hurdles and misunderstandings that affect it. Our findings show how design choices can support the learning of the GHE, leading to the formulation of design principles that help foster understanding. The iterative approach strongly improved the design and evaluation and allowed for a significant refinement of the TLSs. The implementation and evaluation process, which went on from 2017 to 2021, involved undergraduate students attending a course on “experimental physics laboratory” at the University of Trento in those years. The results indicate that, in the end, students can reach an effective understanding of the physical grounds of the GHE.