Collaborative Research: Ocean Tracks College Edition: Investigating Marine Migrations in a Changing Ocean

Education Development Center, Waltham MA

Investigators

Abstract

In a world that is increasingly data-intensive, there is an urgent national need to equip students with the scientific reasoning capacities and data inquiry skills that are required in modern scientific occupations and the broader workforce. To address this need, scientists, educators, and researchers at Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Stanford University have been conducting research that has led to the development of a unique Web interface called Ocean Tracks for use by high school students. This interface provides easy access and a set of student-friendly analysis tools to facilitate the study of large-scale data collected through global oceanographic research projects and earth-orbiting satellites. This project, The Ocean Tracks College Edition (OT-CE), will build and expand on this prior work by developing new curriculum resources and active learning experiences for students at the undergraduate level. OT-CE educational materials will help students at diverse undergraduate institutions acquire critical scientific inquiry and data analysis skills as they use the Ocean Tracks interface to investigate questions of current scientific interest related to the migrations and habitats of top marine predators in the Pacific Ocean. An extensive research component will investigate the impact of OT-CE on student learning and the relative effectiveness of OT-CE in online and face-to-face formats. This research will build the knowledge base on how to support student learning and skills development in working with large data sets. The Ocean Tracks College Edition (OT-CE) project will develop and research a learning model that allows undergraduate students to engage in scientific practices using authentic data. The data are accessed using the Ocean Tracks interface, a tool developed using an NSF DR K-12 exploratory grant in 2012-2014. During the first year of the project, the OT-CE team will gather baseline data on how oceanography and marine biology faculty at community colleges and four-year undergraduate institutions across the country are using authentic, large-scale databases in their undergraduate instruction, and how the Ocean Tracks Web interface and curriculum could be designed to meet diverse undergraduate teaching and learning needs. During the second year, the team will co-develop and test curriculum materials and lab modules with two faculty members and their undergraduate students at Palomar College, a two-year community college, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a four-year research university, both in California. Research will focus on collecting formative data as faculty and students engage with online and face-to-face versions of OT-CE materials. During the final year, the team will conduct a randomized experiment of the revised online OT-CE curriculum with approximately 250 students at Palomar College. An external summative evaluation will collect feedback from a sample of undergraduate science faculty on the potential feasibility of implementing online or face-to-face versions of OT-CE in their college courses. The OT-CE project will produce new knowledge that can be generalized across multiple fields about how to engage students in scientific inquiry with large-scale datasets. By studying the impacts of OT-CE in both online and face-to-face learning formats as well as at two-year and four-year undergraduate institutions, the project will also yield important insights into the design of undergraduate curricula that are effective in promoting data science skills in varied educational delivery modes and among diverse undergraduate populations.