The application of spreadsheets for teaching hydrological modeling and climate change impacts on streamflow

Abstract

Hydrology teaching currently relies upon educators' background, requiring a change in training future professionals to manage water resources to address climate change, among other issues. In the teaching experience described in this paper, traditional lectures in a postgraduate civil engineering master's degree were replaced by the development and assessment of a lumped hydrological model implemented into an Excel spreadsheet. Although the primary activity evaluated the long‐term impacts of climate change on streamflow in a watershed, the students were required to address several specific issues such as calibration and validation processes, goodness‐of‐fit metrics, uncertainties of parameters, and sensitivity analysis. The learning experience's efficacy was assessed by conducting two surveys comparing the participants' knowledge before and after the exercise. The results revealed that 92.3% of the students considered that their hydrological skills had improved significantly following the exercise. Furthermore, the acquisition of hydrological modeling concepts was satisfactorily appreciated by all the participants, 97.6% of whom considered it useful or highly useful. Using a spreadsheet as a complementary tool in hydrology teaching increases student participation and motivation provided it is a contemporary and appealing issue, and the teacher clearly defines, monitors, and follows up on the class objectives.

How you teach changes who you reach: understanding the effect of teaching modality on student engagement, content interest, and learning in undergraduate hydrology

“…Prior hydrologic education investigations studying the impact of shifting teaching modalities away from lecturing have focused heavily on aggregated student perceptions of learning (Gallagher et al, 2021;Knoben & Spieler, 2022; S. W. Lyon et al, 2013;Merck et al, 2021;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2022). The result that we observed was similar to prior studies noting improved student perceptions of learning as well as foundational research on studentled education.…”

“…Evaluating this result in the context of prior research on hydrology education is challenging because few studies have employed multiple methods of quantifying student outcomes beyond questionnaires distributed to students (Gallagher et al, 2021;Knoben & Spieler, 2022;S. W. Lyon et al, 2013;Merck et al, 2021;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2022). Proposed improvements to teaching are likely outpacing our capacity to critically measure their value.…”

“…Several studies focused on student appraisals of in-class activities suggest that course modules focused on hydrological simulations resulted in student perceptions of enriched educational experiences (Gallagher et al, 2021;Knoben & Spieler, 2022;S. W. Lyon et al, 2013;Merck et al, 2021;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2022).…”

“…Another challenge is that prior studies place strong emphasis on group mean outcomes of hydrology courses (i.e., average perceptions, average assessment scores), rather than the outcomes of individuals (Gallagher et al, 2021;Knoben & Spieler, 2022;S. W. Lyon et al, 2013;Merck et al, 2021;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2022). Student preferences for information formats vary and any given teaching style may resonate most strongly with only a subset of learners (Spoon & Schell, 1998).…”

airGRteaching: an open-source tool for teaching hydrological modeling with R

“…Elshorbagy (2005) used a system dynamics approach based on the STELLA visual programming language (Richmond et al, 1985) for teaching watershed hydrology. Pérez-Sánchez et al (2022) described the use of Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corporation, 2019) spreadsheets for teaching hydrological modeling and for estimating climate change impacts in a postgraduate civil engineering master's degree. The HBV rainfall-runoff model has been used several times as a basis to develop an education-dedicated version: AghaKouchak and Habib (2010) and AghaKouchak et al (2013) developed the HBV-EDU toolbox in MATLAB to teach hydrology and uncertainty estimation 2 , while Seibert and Vis (2012) created the HBV-light software.…”