Abstract

Environmental education is an important means of developing climate literacy skills and helping students deal with the existing sustainability problems that emerge, including global warming, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and degradation of ecosystems. Nevertheless, traditional methods of educating on environmental science do not offer sufficient practical experience, lack student engagement, and fail to give learners a chance to comprehend complex climate mechanisms through interaction. This study focuses on assessing the effectiveness of digital learning methods as a tool for improving environmental science knowledge and climate change awareness in students. A quantitative experimental design was used through the pre-test/post-test method with 200 participants, who were undergraduate students who were engaged in an eight-week digital learning intervention. The proposed method comprised online learning techniques, digital content, simulation exercises, virtual environmental experiments, and online assessments. The results revealed a significant improvement in learning outcomes since there was an increase in environmental knowledge from 66.2% to 91.5% using digital learning. There was also a significant improvement in the climate awareness indicators: climate risk awareness, which increased from 62.5% to 89.6%; sustainability practices, which improved from 58.7% to 87.4%; and environmental responsibility, which increased from 64.3% to 91.2%. Analysis of the students' engagement proved high efficiency; the level of content engagement was 92.4%, learning satisfaction 90.8%, knowledge acquisition 88.9%, and participation 91.6%. The comparative assessment proved that the digital learning model proposed performed much better in terms of knowledge gain (91.5%), engagement (91.6%), and awareness (92.4%) than conventional and online learning approaches.