Experimental Design
Our project leverages the unique context of Italy, the first country in the world to introduce climate change in the primary and secondary schooling curricula starting from the upcoming school year 2020/2021. Within this context, we implement a randomized control trial to evaluate the impact of training secondary school teachers and, through these, their students about climate change and climate policy. From the school year 2020/2021, Italian students in every grade of primary and secondary education may study climate related topics as part of the new cross-disciplinary civics. To evaluate the causal effects of the introduction of climate change education in Italian secondary schools on teachers, students, and families, we implement a randomized intervention on teachers at the province level. The intervention consists of an online course for teachers on climate change, which we will offer to teachers in the treatment group. Naturally, because we cannot force all teachers randomly assigned to treatment to take the course, we will use an imperfect-compliance framework for the analysis. The decision to be exposed to the treatment is an important part of the study in its own right. Incidentally, imperfect compliance of treatment to assignment may also occur because control units receive the treatment. While we cannot guarantee for sure that no control teacher gets access to the online course offered to teachers assigned to treatment, our design includes strategies to avoid as much as possible such contamination, which are described below. Our project comprises five stages. In the first stage, baseline measures are collected, including through a survey of teachers, pupils, and parents. Teachers in treatment provinces are recruited for the intervention. The goal of the baseline is to collect pre-treatment information on teachers’: socio-demographics; education and training; teaching experience and career; past and planned teaching of civics and/or environmental and climate topics; knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, habits, and behaviors related to climate issues. This stage is expected to take place during the summer of 2020. Teachers are informed about the survey and the course – and families will be informed about the survey – by the school principals, who in turn are alerted about the initiative by the provincial school boards. Additional emails will be sent directly from the University of Verona to the schools’ principals. Communications with local school boards, principals and, through the latter, with teachers and families are being managed separately for treatment and control groups. Participants in the treatment and control groups are provided different survey links, course links, and course passwords to register for the course. Moreover, detailed information about the school and location of each participant will be collected systematically in each survey and, for teachers, also at the course registration. This will enable us to check for potential contaminations. To make sure that student participation is contingent on parental approval (consent), we ask parents to forward the survey link to their children after taking the survey themselves. In the second stage, teachers in treatment provinces are treated. That is, teachers assigned to treatment status will have the opportunity to take a free online course on climate change. The course lasts about 10 hours and consists of video lectures, slides, interactive material and quizzes, covering topics within three broad themes: (i) The Science of Climate Change; (ii) The Impact of Climate Change; and (iii) Being Part of the Solution. Those teachers who complete the course by watching all video lectures will receive an official attendance certificate, awarded by the University of Verona. This stage is expected to take place during the fall of 2020. In the third stage, ex-post values are collected in both treatment and control groups, for teachers, pupils, and parents. This stage is expected to take place during the spring of 2020. In the fourth stage, control and treatment switch roles. Schools in provinces initially assigned to the treatment group are now subject to the intervention, while schools in provinces initially assigned to the treatment group represent an already-treated control group. This stage is expected to take place during the late spring of 2021. In the fifth stage, ex-post values are collected for both treatment arms, for teachers, pupils, and parents. This stage is expected to take place during the spring of 2022. Hence, our staggered implementation allows us to leverage two experiments with the same intervention as well as to study medium-run outcomes, almost two years after the intervention was first implemented.