Tsunami at school. An experimental strategy to increase students’ risk perception

Abstract

We tested a methodology for assessing high school students’ tsunami risk perception and knowledge to improve their tsunami awareness. Our objective was to test whether the use of a structured questionnaire on tsunami risk perception could be used as a tool to assess students’ improvement after a lesson on tsunamis. For this purpose, we involved about 100 students from four classes of a high school (Polo Liceale Statale “Lazzaro Spallanzani”) in the town of Tivoli, in central Italy, about 20 km from Rome and 40 km from the seaside. We administered the questionnaire in three subsequent surveys (to 94, 96, and 109 students, respectively), the first of which without providing any information on which subject they would be dealing with. Students were asked to answer the 31 questions individually, each using her/his mobile phone during science class. After two months, all four classes were trained with a frontal lesson and a discussion on tsunami risk. Afterwards, we administered the questionnaire again and ran the second survey. Finally, we met the students one year later and administered the questionnaire again, then we compared the three survey results. The comparison shows that the students’ risk knowledge and perception, which was generally very low in the first survey, improved significantly after the lesson and the relative discussion. Although this result was somewhat expected, it has been possible to confirm and quantify the improvement. According to studies conducted using similar methods [Gray and Di Loreto, 2016; Ayllón et al., 2019], the active participation of students, the collaborative approach provided by teachers and researchers, and the use of a survey tool such as a questionnaire – which, despite being completed individually, fosters an environment of emotional sharing – all contribute to stimulating students’ curiosity and facilitating their learning in traditional educational settings. We then administered the questionnaire to the same classes one year later. The outputs of the third survey show a partial decrease in students’ awareness that nevertheless remains significantly better than in the first survey. This suggests that the students’ involvement in the learning process through the questionnaire and through an active discussion after watching videos and pictures works well, but also that a periodic reminder by the science teachers is needed to maintain a constant level of risk awareness and perception. We propose to replicate this approach by involving teachers in the survey, providing them with a recorded lesson with all the basic elements, to be shown between the first and second administration of the questionnaire, and with periodic (yearly) reminders.