Evaluation of Disaster-Related Science Lesson Plans to Promote Learning Continuity After Hurricane Maria

Although natural disasters have been used in the past to develop project-based learning (PBL) lessons, there is a lack of research that examines their use in the aftermath of a natural disaster. The purpose of this project is to leverage ongoing efforts related to science education and the current emergency and disaster recovery landscape in Puerto Rico. The Yale Ciencia Initiative, in collaboration with Ciencia Puerto Rico, working with the Department of Education of Puerto Rico will develop culturally relevant project-based science lesson plans that incorporate the disaster context that can be implemented both inside and outside of the traditional classroom. The project will allow displaced students to continue learning under the guidance of teachers, parents or social workers. The project will train educators in the use of disaster-related problem-based lessons and assess project implementation and the impact of the lessons. The final outcome of this aim will be a lesson plan template and implementation guidelines for other jurisdictions faced by natural disasters. The project will result in enhanced infrastructure for education by developing tools and implementation guidelines that other jurisdictions may use to develop their own lesson plans in advance of natural disasters, so as to assure continuity of learning.

The project will assess implementation through observations and rubrics, surveys for parents, educators and students, and focus groups with each of these populations. To assess the impact of contextualized PBL lessons, the project will collect survey data, before and after the educational intervention, to measure changes in students' content knowledge, as well as in attitudes that are predictive of engagement in science learning. Results will be compared to matched control groups that receive either the standard curriculum, which are not contextualized to the disaster and that does not include PBL, or a PBL lesson plan that does not incorporate the disaster or the cultural context. At least 30 educators and 200 7th grade students will be exposed during the project period to the contextualized PBL lesson plan. The resulting feasibility analysis will inform other jurisdictions preparing their educational systems for natural disasters and provide evidence for the use of contextualized lesson plans that incorporate PBL in disaster recovery settings. In addition, the project design will advance the field of PBL by allowing investigators to examine the impact of integrating current social/historical contexts to PBL lessons and by examining the relationship between changes in science attitudes and engagement, with changes in learning.