This project is developing three inquiry-based, lab-focused, online Climate Change EarthLabs modules (focus is on the Cryosphere, Climate and Weather, and the Carbon Cycle) as a context for ongoing research into how high school students grasp change over time in the Earth System on multiple time scales. Climate literacy has emerged as an important domain of education. Yet it presents real challenges in cognition, perception, and pedagogy, especially in understanding Earth as a dynamic system operating at local to global spatial scales over multiple time scales. This research project confronts these issues by examining the challenges to high-school students' understanding of Earth's complex systems, operating over various temporal and spatial scales, and by developing research-based insights into effective educational tools and approaches that support learning about climate change and Earth Systems Science. The project is a collaborative effort among science educators at TERC, Mississippi State University, and The University of Texas at Austin.

The project uses a backward-design methodology to identify an integrated set of science learning goals and research questions to inform module development. Development and review of draft materials will be followed by a pilot implementation and then two rounds of teacher professional development, classroom implementation, and research in Texas and Mississippi. Research findings from the multiple rounds of implementation will allow an iterative process for refining the modules, the professional development materials, and the research program.

This project focuses on the design, development, and testing of innovative climate change curriculum materials and teacher professional development for Earth Systems science instruction. The materials will be tested in states with teachers in need of Earth Systems Science training and with significant numbers of low income and minority students who are likely to be hard hit by impending climate change. The research will shed light on the challenges of education for climate literacy.

This project--led by science educators at Michigan State University, the National Geographic Society, the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) at Colorado State University, the Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research (BEAR) Center, and AAAS Project 2061, and including schools in California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, and Washington--builds on prior efforts with learning progressions, and is focused on key carbon-transforming processes in socio-ecological systems at multiple scales, including cellular and organismal metabolism, ecosystem energetics and carbon cycling, carbon sequestration, and combustion of fossil fuels.

The project uses an iterative design research process to develop and refine a suite of tools for reasoning and test efficacy of those tools in geographically and culturally diverse schools. The project team is:

1. Refining and validating a detailed learning progression framework covering the middle and high school years; ultimately, the framework will describe the development of students' capacity to use fundamental principles such as conservation of matter and energy to reason about carbon-transforming processes at multiple scales.

2. Refining 'Tools for Reasoning' that make hidden scientific principles - matter, energy, and scale - visible to students; the power of these tools lies in their flexible use for different processes, systems, scales, and curricular contexts.

3. Developing and refining flexible teaching strategies that engage students in cognitive apprenticeship in the practices of environmental science literacy: a) inquiry and argumentation, b) explanations and predictions, and c) decision-making about environmental issues.

4. Using and refining existing summative assessments, and developing and testing formative assessment tools; these assessment tools will provide teachers and researchers with immediate information about their students' intellectual resources and will be linked to the learning progression framework.

5. Developing, field testing, and assessing the effectiveness of six middle school and six high school units that use project tools and enact project principles; the units introduce students to fundamental principles, engage them in reasoning about carbon-transforming processes at organismal scale, and at landscape and global scales. Each unit includes a) an online formative assessment and b) activity sequences that use tools for reasoning and teaching strategies.

6. Developing, field testing, and assessing professional development materials in both face-to-face and facilitated online forms; the materials introduce teachers to learning progressions in environmental science literacy, assessment tools, tools for reasoning, teaching strategies, and teaching materials and activities, and also address difficulties that teachers encounter in using learning progressions and enacting teaching strategies.

The primary project outcomes will be coordinated instructional tools that are useful to professionals at all levels in the science education system--classroom teachers, professional developers, and developers of curricula, standards and assessments.

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STORE is developing and piloting classroom uses of GIS-based interactive data files displaying climatological, topographical, and biological data about an especially ecologically and topographically diverse section of mid-California and a section of western New York State, plus projected climate change outcomes in 2050 and 2099 from an IPCC climate change model. Both areas contain weather stations. The participating students and teachers live in those areas, hence the place-based focus of the project.

To help teachers make curricular decisions about how to use these data with their students, the project has, with input from six design partner teachers, produced a curriculum module exemplar consisting of six lessons. The lessons start with basic meteorological concepts about the relationship between weather systems and topography, then focus on recent climatological and land cover data. The last two lessons focus on IPCC-sanctioned climate change projections in relation to possible fates of different regional species. Technology light versions of these lessons send students directly to map layers displaying the data for scientific analysis. Technology-heavy versions address the additional goal of building students' capacities to manipulate features of geographic information systems (GIS). Hence, the technology-heavy versions require use of the ARC GIS Explorer Desktop software, whereas the technology light versions are available in both the ARC software and in Google Earth. Google Earth makes possible some student interactivity such as drawing transects and studying elevation profiles, but does not support more advanced use of geographic information system technology such as queries of data-containing shape files or customization of basemaps and data representational symbology.

Answer keys are provided for each lesson. Teachers have in addition access to geospatial data files that display some storm systems that moved over California in the winter of 2010-2001 so that students can study relationships between actual data about storm behavior and relationship to topography and the climatological data which displays those relationships in a summary manner. This provides the student the opportunity to explore differences between weather and climate.

To increase the likelihood of successful classroom implementation and impact on student learning, the professional development process provides the conditions for teachers to make good adaptability decisions for successful follow-through. Teachers can implement the six lessons or adapt them or design their own from scratch. The project requires that they choose from these options, explain on content representation forms their rationales for those decisions, and provide assessment information about student learning outcomes from their implementations. The project provides the teachers with assessment items that are aligned to each of the six lessons, plus some items that test how well the students can interpret the STORE GIS data layers.

All of this work is driven by the hypothesis that science teachers are more likely to use geospatial information technology in their classrooms when provided with the types of resources that they are provided in this project. In summary, these resources include:

1.     tutorials about how to use the two GIS applications

2.     sufficiently adaptive geospatial data available in free easily transportable software applications

3.     lessons that they can implement as is, adapt, or discard if they want to make up their own (as long as they use the data)

4.     supportive resources to build their content knowledge (such as overview documents about their states' climates and information about the characteristics of each data layer and each data set available to them).

The growth and evolution of the teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge is being tracked through interviews, face-to-face group meetings, and classroom observations. Also being tracked is the extent to which the teachers and students can master the technology applications quickly and on their own without workshops, and how well teachers provide feedback to the students and assess their learning outcomes when implementing STORE lessons. As the project moves into its third and final year, we will be studying outcomes from the first classroom implementation year (i.e. year two of the project) and determining to what extent the professional development strategies need to be revised in relation to how the teachers are responding to the project resources and forms of professional support. In the end, the project will contribute to the knowledge base about what professional development strategies are appropriate for getting teachers to use these types of resources, what decisions teachers make about how to use the resources for different courses and student groups they teach, and what are the outcomes of those uses in terms of curricular material, instructional strategies, and student learning.

This DR K-12 Exploratory Project conducted by Education Development Center, Inc.(EDC) and The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps)will address the question: In what ways can research on learning inform the design of interfaces and technology tools to be used by students accessing large scientific data bases? Expertise about this question is scattered among a variety of disciplines, including: science education research related to geology, climate science, and ecology; mathematics and statistics education research; and educational psychology. Consequently, there is no synthesis of knowledge about how to support precollege students' and teachers' use of large scientific data bases. Oceans of Data will therefore (1) conduct a systematic survey of the widely-dispersed research literature and (2) develop and disseminate a knowledge status report, a resource offering guidance for making these large scientific data bases accessible to and usable by high school science classes. This report will inform the work of three target audiences: (1) large science cyberinfrastructure projects concerned with serving student users; (2) intermediary developers (e.g., publishers, research and development organizations, and software development companies) of digital interfaces and tools that can make cyberinfrastructure data appropriate for use by pre-college learners; and (3) education researchers. Most immediately, the project results will be applied directly to the NSF-funded Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI) cyberinfrastructure project at Scripps.

The project design for developing this resource involves a multi-stage review, coding, and analysis of the literature. The coding protocol framing this effort focuses on categories of data representations (such as maps, graphs, 3D representations, animations and multiple data representations) processes of working with data ( such as finding and selecting data, reading data representations, creating data representations, and pattern recognition) and cross-cutting themes (such as visual perception, spatial perception and visualization, cognitive load, and mental models) Work is being conducted under the aegis of an advisory committee: researchers and technology developers in the above-mentioned domains, expert teachers, and individuals representing the target audiences. Advisors will also evaluate the resulting product, as will an additional cadre of targeted end-users.

The Oceans of Data knowledge status report will present: the literature review results; recommendations for designing effective interfaces and technology tools for students; guidelines, based on tenets of universal design for learning (UDL) for designing software for diverse student populations; and suggested avenues for future research to address identified gaps. The project therefore will enable the bridging of science cyberinfrastructure projects in a number of disciplines with pre-college education. Ultimately, students will have unprecedented opportunities to analyze and draw conclusions from cyberinfrastructure data and, thus, to engage in new modes of data-driven science practice.

Dealing with the world's most pressing problems requires an ability to understand and reason about causal complexity. For instance, understanding topics such as ecosystems and global warming involves reasoning about non-obvious causes, spatial gaps, temporal delays, cyclic causality, and distributed causality where the agency/intentionality of one's actions is on a different level than those of the emergent outcomes. The focus of this project is on how children learn to reason about complex causality and how that reasoning can be stimulated and taught in classrooms. The literature on child development suggests that children are capable of understanding complex causal concepts to a greater extent than earlier research suggested. Yet, paradoxically, students' misconceptions in science have been linked to students' difficulties reasoning about complex causality. This study explores how children learn to reason when provided with activities and materials that support three types of reasoning: distributed causality, probabilistic causality, and action at a distance. By conducting and videotaping close interviews at multiple points in the school year with small numbers of students in grades K-6 (the microgenetic phase), the study will characterize children's reasoning at different ages and how it shifts over time and with different learning supports. It will consider the contexts of biology, mechanical reasoning, social reasoning, and games. Classroom-level interventions will then be introduced and studied. In the last year of the project, using what was learned about children's reasoning and how to support it, ecosystems and global warming curriculum units will be designed and tested in middle school classrooms.

This recruitment and informational video provides an overview of the ReaL Earth Inquiry Project. 

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The Facilitating Student Understanding of Change in the Earth System on Multiple Time Scales proposal is being submitted to the NSF-GeoEd solicitation Track 1 Pilot Projects.

There is an increasing need for today’s students to sufficiently understand how the Earth system changes and the processes that cause those changes so they can address the environmental challenges of the future as scientists, decisions makers, and citizens. However, grasping change over time, especially on multiple time scales ranging from daily to ice age variations, is a challenge. The project is pilot project in which we will develop a week-long unit of activities focused on the cryosphere, implement the activities with students, and study their effectiveness.  The results of the study will be used to refine the activities developed in this project and to serve as a foundation for the development of a larger scale high-school Earth science course for which we will seek additional funding.  In addition, we will develop a teacher professional development program to provide training to high-school teachers on the use of these materials.  The overarching goals of this project are:

·  To build, mainly with existing resources, a sequence of scaffolded activities and investigations that will help students more fully understand how the cryosphere changes on multiple time scales and how it impacts and is impacted by the other components of the Earth system.

·  To investigate the effectiveness of the developed sequence of activities and investigations at helping students understand how and why a component of the Earth system varies over time, to apply that knowledge to improve the unit of activities used in this study, and to make that knowledge and materials available to the broader educational community.

Intellectual Merit: The Facilitating Student Understanding of Change in the Earth System on Multiple Time Scales project will help us to understand more clearly the difficulties high-school students have in comprehending how the Earth system changes on multiple time scales, and to design activities and materials that can help them and their teachers overcome these challenges. There is currently little work of direct relevance to pre-college age students’ models of Earth change. Therefore, we believe that the proposed effort will add significantly to the research base. In addition, the curriculum materials we create will have clear benefit and application for high-school Earth science classes.

Broader Impacts: In this pilot project we will focus on an interesting component of the Earth system—the cryosphere (sea ice, glaciers, and continental ice)—to develop a week-long unit of activities that will help students understand change in the cryosphere on a range of time scales and the causes of those changes. The results of this work will 1) provide a firm foundation on which to develop a full high-school capstone Earth system science course that will include the broader range of complexity and time scales present in the Earth system – a course which is now on the books in Texas; 2) make these materials available to high-school teachers and students across the country through the EarthLabs web site, and 3) move the efforts of the Revolution in Earth and Space Science Education forward by establishing reviewed and tested components of this course in Texas and make it possible to promote the establishment of this course in other states.

TERC researchers are collaborating with STEM educators, curriculum/software developers, scientists, social scientists, and statisticians to explore:

• how large scientific and social scientific data sets could provide a vehicle for secondary students to learn about statistical ideas
• how developing an understanding of statistics could contribute to learning about the science and social science content
• the characteristics of curricular supports and software tools that could promote rigorous engagement with statistical ideas among secondary students

The project builds on the increasing availability of a variety of large data sets, and on students’ inherent interest in data sets related to “hot” topics such as the environment and climate change, the human genome, economic justice issues, space exploration, and medical research.

Through reviewing literature and discussing ideas with advisors and colleagues, the project developed several hypotheses about potential affordances for students in working with large data sets. In the final year of the project, we tested several of these hypotheses by developing activities and using interviews and observations of secondary students engaging with these activities to gather evidence of their potential, analyzing and writing about these interviews, presenting this work at conferences, and submitting a paper about this work to a peer-reviewed journal.

Overview

It is increasingly important for all American students to become sophisticated thinkers of science. The Center for Essential Science at the University of Michigan is conducting educational research to engage and support complex thinkers of science and to improve science learning in high-poverty, urban, elementary and middle school classrooms, with particular focus on the Detroit Public Schools. Our previous work focused on fourth through sixth grades, a period when the performance of American science students falls significantly behind that of students in other countries. In this grant, we extend our learning progressions and associated curricular materials, visualization technologies and educational research from fourth to the tenth grade. In particular, this grant is focused in two areas:

• the development and empirical evaluation of eight to twelve-week curricular units and associated technologies to promote students' deep understandings of the impact of climate change on ecosystems dynamics and animal interactions, and
• the exploration of new ideas in educational assessment leading to tests that evaluate students' complex reasoning with science.

A Sense of Urgency on Learning Ecological Impacts of Global Climate Change

The modern world is experiencing substantial and rapid changes that are reshaping not only human societies but natural ecosystems worldwide. During the lifetimes of our current middle and high school students, it is likely that our planet will undergo more anthropogenic change than it has during all of human history to date.  While scientists from many disciplines are modeling, monitoring, predicting, and analyzing climate change, understanding the impacts and consequences of climate change cannot be left to scientists alone.

 While scientists are aware of the sense of urgency to develop scientific understanding of the impacts of global climate changes, science education resources and sound research on students’ development of complex reasoning about ecological impacts of global climate change are scarce, despite recognition from scientists and policy makers of the importance of this topic. Several factors contribute to this absence. First, global climate change is an extremely multi-disciplinary domain that does not easily fit into existing K-12 disciplinary boundaries of earth science, life science, and physical science. The American Institute for Global Change Research defines global change as “the interactions of biological, chemical and physical processes that regulate changes in the function on the Earth system, including the particular ways in which these changes are influenced by human activities” (American Institute for Global Change Research, 2008). Second, scientific information associated with global climate change is relatively new and emergent, disallowing strong representation in science standards, high stakes tests, textbooks or curricular units utilized in classrooms. Our previous research suggests that the complexity of content coupled with almost no representation on high stakes tests leads to a low priority for many classroom teachers and consequently little to no classroom time. (S. Blum, personal communication 11.6.08). Third, global climate change is a dynamic topic that might be best addressed with resources that couple curricular activities which guide the development of complex inquiry reasoning and modeling/simulation resources to represent the dynamic nature of the science. While modeling and simulation resources exist for professional scientists (e.g., Lifemapper designed by proposal co-PI), neither the guided curricular activities nor the modeling and simulation resources are widely available for middle and high school audiences.

Together, a sense of urgency exists to build a solid, research-based foundation about a new and essential focus area within pre-college science education: students’ complex inquiry reasoning about the impact of global changes on ecosystem dynamics. This sense of urgency can be addressed through the combination of three research-based activities addressed in this proposal: (1) the extension of existing 4-6^th grade curricular units towards the development and empirical evaluation of a 4-10^th grade curricular progression focused on complex reasoning about biodiversity and the impact of global changes on populations of animals and ecosystem dynamics; (2) the development and evaluation of ecological simulation and modeling resources to accompany the middle and high school units; and (3) sound educational research to provide strong empirical evidence of both growth spurts and plateaus, as well as documentation of how and when complex inquiry reasoning occurs among middle and early high school students in these focus areas.

The program outlined will serve as the major research vehicle for research questions in several interrelated areas. We propose a research design with a series of quasi-experimental studies that will complement each other and provide multiple lenses for understanding complex questions such as these. Our research questions are:

1. Which scientific content and reasoning skills are essential for 7-10^th graders’ complex reasoning and modeling of the ecological impacts of climate change? How are these manifested in content and inquiry reasoning progressions?

2. What dynamic visualization and modeling resources support the development of deep thinking about the ecological impacts of climate change?

3. What scaffolding and instructional activities support the development of deep thinking about the ecological impacts of climate change, including both content (ecological impacts) and complex reasoning components (science practices) of this knowledge, within cohorts of 7-10^th graders in two new curricular units?

4. Utilizing quantitative (growth curve models, cross sectional studies) and qualitative (think aloud interviews) analyses, what learning outcomes and growth trajectories are realized by 7-10^th intervention and control students as measured by both traditional standardized items and assessments focusing on complex thinking about ecological impacts of climate change?  

We believe the greatest contribution of our work will be clear empirical information (growth spurts, growth plateaus and achievement information) associated with middle and high school students’ learning of complex and dynamic science associated with the ecological impacts of global climate change. We see the empirically driven development of learning progressions, curricular units, assessment instruments and professional development resources as important secondary contributions. The hypotheses we wish to test are the following:  Do Detroit, rural and small city students who work with coordinated scaffold-rich inquiry programs and visualization resources focusing on impacts of global climate change develop deep conceptual understandings as compared to matched cohorts students?  As determined by growth curve analyses, what do their learning trajectories look like? What new insights about the design of scaffold-rich curricular units and visualization technologies can be gleaned from an analysis of students’ growth trajectories and summative achievement results?  What kinds of assessment instruments are needed to provide reliable and valid measurement of learning progressions in these focus areas? What can we learn about the design of a series of multi-year, coordinated learning resources from the empirically driven development of learning progressions associated with an important emerging science, the ecological impacts of climate change?