Self-Assessment

Learning Outcomes Survey

We have now come to the end of Unit 1. The purpose of this exercise is to encourage you to think a little bit about what you have learned well, and just as importantly, about what you feel you have not learned so well. Think about the learning objectives presented at the beginning of the Unit, and repeated below. What did you find difficult or challenging about the things you feel you should have learned better than you did? What do you think would have helped you learn these things better?

For each Module in Unit 1, rank the learning outcomes in order of how well you believe you have mastered them. A rank of 1 means you are most confident in your mastery of that objective. Use each rank only once - so if there are four objectives for a given module, you should mark one with a 1, one with a 2, one with a 3, and one with a 4. All items must be ranked. For each Module, indicate what was difficult about the objective you have marked at the lowest confidence level.

Module 1

___Recognize that even really smart people have failed when climate changed in the past.

___Explain how machines and trade have helped other people avoid catastrophe.

___Describe how we have burned through energy sources in the past.

___Show that people can make money and save the world at the same time.

What did you find most challenging about the objective you ranked the lowest?

Module 2

___Recall that using energy doesn’t make it go away, it is just converted into a less useful form.

___Recognize the many units of energy and power.

___Show that the amount of energy used by people around the world is much larger than the 100 watts inside most people converted from food.

___Recall that around 85% of the energy we use is derived from fossil fuels.

___Analyze energy use and production in a country other than the United States.

What did you find most challenging about the objective you ranked the lowest?

Module 3

___Recall that oil, coal and natural gas are produced naturally by well-understood processes.

___Evaluate the effects of technology, economics, and population growth on fossil fuel production using computer models.

___Demonstrate that our current consumption of fossil fuels is not sustainable by exploring future scenarios with computer models.

What did you find most challenging about the objective you ranked the lowest?

Module 4

___Recall that carbon dioxide has a well-understood and physically unavoidable warming influence on Earth’s climate.

___Recognize that positive feedbacks amplify changes, and negative feedbacks reduce them.

___Recall that multiple independent records from different places using different methods all show that both CO₂ and temperature are rising.

___Explain that patterns of global warming in the past century can only be reproduced by considering both natural and human influences on climate.

___Use a model to show that global climate always finds a steady state, but certain factors may influence how long it takes to get there.

___Demonstrate that greenhouse gases are the most significant factor controlling surface temperature.

What did you find most challenging about the objective you ranked the lowest?

Module 5

___Summarize how the Earth’s history confirms the warming influence of carbon dioxide.

___Recognize that past climate changes have greatly affected plants and animals, usually in unpleasant ways.

___Recall that future rise in CO₂, and therefore surface temperature, is likely to be much worse than what we have experienced in the past 100 years.

___Explain how small amounts of climate change are worse for poor people, and larger amounts are bad for everyone.

___Assess what you have learned in Unit 1.

What did you find most challenging about the objective you ranked the lowest?

Scoring Information and Rubric

The self-assessment is worth a total of 25 points.