Environmental Science

Environmental education is essential for protecting and restoring natural water sources. Integrating education with positive environmental experiences can instill values and stewardship in the public, encouraging proactive steps to preserve and enhance water resources. Elementary teachers can incorporate real-world water-related environmental issues into their classrooms, promoting critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Place-based education, which involves experiential learning in local settings, effectively builds connections between students and their communities. Authentic water-focused climate science learning should anchor in local phenomena, fostering student inquiry and validating student voices.

Water scarcity poses a significant global challenge, which is often overlooked, particularly in regions with abundant water resources. This article outlines a curriculum designed for middle school students (grades 6–8) that addresses the dynamics of water scarcity and sustainability through five detailed lessons centered around the water cycle.

Despite a growing effort to integrate students’ civic action projects into science and engineering curricula that address climate change and environmental justice, there are few frameworks that guide teachers and students to make well-informed decisions and actions towards a more just and sustainable future. This article presents a tool, Civic Action Matrix, that characterizes different types of students’ civic action projects. The tool attends to two dimensions of activities that capture important aspects of learning–the development of student agency and understanding the complexity of climate and environmental issues.

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.

Our research study examines the community-based partnership PD model and its impact on school teachers’ self-efficacy and their success in engaging students in the NGSS science practices through citizen science projects.

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

Schoolyard SITES Curriculum Workbook includes a narrative description of the SITES professional development program and the Project Planning Guide.

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.