Identifying El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) preconceptions held by college students prior to instruction

Teacher experience and cognitive theory converge in showing that students’ prior knowledge strongly shapes how new scientific concepts are learned. Effective instruction builds on the knowledge and reasoning strategies that learners already possess, refining partial understandings and supporting meaningful conceptual change. This study examines undergraduate students’ pre-instruction conceptions of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), highlighting the cognitive resources they bring to introductory geography courses. Grounded in Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) theory, the study employed a cognitive-driven assessment development approach, collecting data from 96 students across seven courses at two Midwestern institutions during Winter 2024, with follow-up interviews conducted with 11 participants. Student responses were analyzed using a scoring rubric, coding system, and lexicon, all validated by expert reviewers. Results reveal that students possessed partial, yet valuable, understandings of ENSO, including recognition of its climate impacts, temperature differences between El Niño and La Niña, and associations with rainfall changes, alongside preconceptions. These existing mental frameworks provide instructors with entry points for scaffolding instruction toward scientifically coherent, system-level understanding. Findings inform curriculum development, instructional strategies, and assessment design by emphasizing the instructional value of students’ preexisting ideas and their role in fostering coherent mental models of ENSO dynamics. This work underscores the importance of diagnosing prior knowledge as an asset for guiding effective, theory-informed instruction in undergraduate geoscience education.