Environmental Science

This collection of 10 investigations offers collaborative, NGSS-aligned plant science lessons for middle and high school that include guides for students, teachers, and mentors.

This Citizen Science Guide provides specific guidance on identifying relevant citizen science projects that fits an educators' curricular and instructional needs.

Online plotter for historical data and student data collected using the Emery Method for beach profiling.

Collaboration between ecologists and learning scientists can give rise to powerful models for scientific outreach within ecology. This paper presents a process by which learning scientists and ecologists codesigned a science curriculum that invites students to join an ecological community of practice. In the Journey to El Yunque middle school science curriculum, students engage with simulation models generated from data gathered by Luquillo Long Term Ecological Research (LUQ LTER) scientists.

Engineering design systematically identifies needs, wants, and problems and then devises solutions to address them. A central component of our work is guiding students in the engineered design of solutions to local environmental problems.

Songer, N. B. (2023). Why is engineering design important for all learners?. Open Access Government April 2023, pp.300-301. https://doi.org/10.56367/OAG-038-10193

Puttick, G., Drayton, B., & Gasca, S. (2023). Open innovation challenge to mitigate global warming. Connected Science Learning, 5(5).

The Innovate to Mitigate (I2M) project poses challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible, innovative strategies that mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. Design is informed by research on problem-based learning, pedagogy for which poses demands on teachers. This paper presents preliminary evidence about how I2M teachers supported student teams to engage in science and engineering practices.