International Ocean Literacy Survey
Despite considerable investments in Ocean Literacy over the last 15 years, it has been difficult to show progress of the Ocean Literacy movement, in part, because no widely adopted measurement tool exists. Previous researchers on ocean learning have used a wide variety of methods, target groups, learning goals, and conceptual frameworks. The need for a common, shared measurement tool has been widely expressed by members of the Ocean Literacy community around the world to determine the impact of particular interventions, to establish a baseline of Ocean Literacy in particular communities, to detect changes in Ocean Literacy levels in particular communities over time, and to compare differences in levels of Ocean Literacy across communities.
The International Ocean Literacy Survey (IOLS) project, an unfunded, grassroots and collaborative effort, was initiated in 2015 to address this challenge.
The IOLS, is a community-based measurement tool that allows the comparison of levels of ocean knowledge among 15 to 17 year olds across time and location. The IOLS includes multiple choice questions addressing the ideas about the ocean described by the Ocean Literacy Framework. The IOLS has already gone through two rounds of field testing. The results from the second testing, provide evidence that the IOLS is psychometrically valid and reliable, and has a single factor structure across 17 languages and 24 countries as presented in our previous publication.
The analyses of Version 2 of the IOLS guided the construction of Version 3 that was then shared with the IOLS Advisory Board composed of international educators, teachers, communicators, marine scientists and psychometricians. Two rounds of reviews with our advisors lead to the completion of Version 4 that was translated into 14 languages and went through a final round of testing January through March 2019.
The IOLS Version 4 data were collected in early 2019 from participants ages 15 to 17 years old. We received 7,900 responses to the survey in the following languages: English (N = 1481), Dutch (N = 677), Portuguese (N = 640), Simplified Chinese (N = 575), Korean (N = 538), Japanese (N = 465), Spanish (N = 433), Italian (N = 358), Catalan (N = 258), Thai (N = 198), Traditional Chinese (N = 190), Polish (N = 137), Tagalog (N = 70), and Greek (N = 48). Overall the reliability was excellent (ordinal alpha = 0.93), meaning that items in the ocean literacy scale have high internal consistency. In addition, the IOLS scale was unidimensional based on the acceptable CFA analysis results (CFI = .86, TLI = .86, RMSEA = .04, SRMR = .04), meaning that IOLS measures only one latent trait: Ocean Literacy.
We are pleased to report that a paper describing the results from the Version 4 test of the IOLS has been accepted for publication. We will present the paper at the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, April 17-21, 2020.
The final version of the International Ocean Literacy survey is available here.
The Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley leads this effort along with the following partner organizations that support the development of the Survey.
