Work Package 2 of the ClimateTeach2025 project has been completed with the finalisation of the Climate Change Awareness Assessment Tool, a multidimensional instrument developed and validated across four European countries.
The development process started from a gap identified in the literature: climate change awareness has most often been measured as a single dimension focused on factual knowledge, leaving emotional and behavioural aspects aside. Following a needs analysis, the project team designed a tool covering three interrelated domains — knowledge, emotion and behaviour — as a five-point Likert scale.
Experts in climate change and psychological well-being from each partner country drafted items for every dimension and refined them in a joint online panel, producing an initial pool of 84 items. External experts who were not part of the project team then evaluated each item for relevance and clarity, reducing the pool to 60 items.
The 60-item form was piloted face to face with 25 students in Türkiye, 20 in Austria, 20 in Finland and 25 in Romania. Austria and Finland used the original English form, while Turkish and Romanian versions were produced through cross-cultural translation and expert verification. Student feedback on unclear items led to a refined 52-item form for the main validity and reliability study.
Data were collected online from university students in all four partner countries; after the removal of outliers, analyses were carried out on 737 participants with a mean age of 22.88. Exploratory factor analysis confirmed a three-factor structure explaining 62.59% of the total variance (KMO = .927), resulting in a final 21-item scale with 8 knowledge, 8 emotion and 5 behaviour items. Reliability coefficients were high across the board, with a Cronbach’s alpha of .902 for the overall scale.
The accompanying report, prepared as a practical guide to the administration of the tool, will be published in English with annexes in Turkish, Romanian and German.