Facilitating a Deeper Understanding of Change in the Earth System on Multiple Time Scales

Terc Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Facilitating Student Understanding of Change in the Earth System on Multiple Time Scales is a pilot project to develop a week-long unit of activities focused on the cryosphere, implement the activities with students, and study their effectiveness. This project is motivated by the increasing need for today's students to sufficiently understand how the Earth system changes so they can address the environmental challenges of the future as scientists, decisions makers, and citizens. This project will provide new insights on the difficulties high-school students have in comprehending Earth system changes on multiple time scales, and to design activities and materials that can help them and their teachers overcome these challenges. The overarching goals of this project are to: 1) 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, and 2) 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. This work will 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 - and make these materials available to high-school teachers and students across the country through the EarthLabs web site. In addition, the project will create a teacher professional development program to provide training to high-school teachers on the use of these materials. Project partners include TERC (project lead and materials development), Michigan State University and Mississippi State University (evaluation and research), University of Texas-Austin (Texas Earth and Space Science Revolution Project - materials review and implementation).