Experiential Discoveries in Geoscience Education
Posted on: Wednesday, 28 May 2008, 03:00 CDT
By Connor, Cathy Prakash, Anupma
ABSTRACT Alaska's students directly observe their high-latitude landscape changing in response to both active tectonics and warming temperatures. Alaska's secondary school teachers must increasingly provide Earth systems science education that integrates these personal observations with geospatial datasets and satellite images using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. Alaskan job opportunities requiring Earth science and GIS training are increasing, yet less than 1% of Alaska's university students choose geoscience-related majors. The EDGE (Experiential Discoveries in Geoscience Education) program provides a year of Earth science college courses, geologic field experiences, GIS instruction, and technical support for groups of Alaskan high and middle school teachers and their students. Since 2005 EDGE has increased the Earth science content knowledge and GIS and computer skills of 34 Alaskan teachers and facilitated the transfer of their knowledge and skills into Alaska's science classrooms. More than 500 middle school students have learned GIS from EDGE teachers and 30 EDGE high school students have conducted original research utilizing GIS related to landscape change and its impacts on their own communities. Long- term EDGE goals include improving student performance on the newly implemented (2007) 10^sup th^ grade standards-based science test scores, recruiting first-generation college students, and increasing the number of Earth science majors in the University of Alaska system. More information on EDGE programs is available at
INTRODUCTION
Great distances and a harsh climate separate people in Alaska to a far greater extent than in other states. Many Alaskan students grow up in a small village or town that is unconnected to any other community by a road or rail system; even the state capital, Juneau, is accessible only by air or sea. Living in a state that is one- fifth the size of the continental U.S. with a human population of [similar to]648,818 distributed over 1,518,800 km^sup 2^ (0.43 people/km^sup 2^), many Alaskan students face issues of isolation. Alaskan students are also an ethnically-diverse group composed, from pre-school to grade 12, of approximately 56% Caucasian, 25% Alaska Native, 6% Asian/Pacific Islander, 4% Hispanic, and 4% African- American individuals (AK Dept of Ed, 2007a).
Alaska obtains >80% of its annual revenues from petroleum resources. With the rising value of metals, mining companies have tripled their Alaska investments since 2003. These two Earth science industries employ 12 % of the Alaska workforce and utilize GIS to manage their enormous spatial databases. Alaska high school graduates who understand the uses to which spatial data can be put, and who can produce GIS maps from those data, will have an advantage in the geoscience workplace and are more likely to be successful if they go on to the university after high school (Prakash, 2006).
In 2003, U.S. Department of Labor statistics projected a need for 439,000 new workers in geospatial technologies between 2004 and 2014. In Alaska, 683 new state technician and scientist positions that require familiarity with GIS technology will be added to the workforce over the next 10 years at mean wages (in 2007 dollars) of $20/hr (technicians), and $30/hr (scientists) (AK DOL, 2007). Employers will include native corporations, federal and state natural resource agencies, the defense industry, and private industry. These workers will manage AK native land claims, mining claims, fishing leases, petroleum reserves, forest selections, transportation corridors, and government and military projects. They will be involved with land surveying, land development and design, mapping and tax assessment, the defense industry, environmental engineering assessment and management, public safety and welfare, health care, transportation, agriculture, business, natural sciences, facilities management, marine environments, homeland security, and private developments (AK DOL, 2007). The number of Alaska's high school and college graduates currently qualified to do this work is insufficient to meet these workforce demands (Tissier, 2006).
THE DYNAMIC GEOLOGIC SETTING OF THE 49^sup th^ STATE
The world's highest crustal uplift rates of >32 mm/yr are presently occurring along Alaska's Gulf Coast near Yakutat and in Glacier Bay (Larsen et al., 2005). In Alaska's most populous south- central region, which includes Anchorage, the state's largest city, 52% of the state's population lives above an active subduction zone where 1,000 >M 3.5 earthquake events occur each year, events large enough to be noticed by a substantial number of people. Anchorage's Ted Stevens International Airport directs daily air traffic along flight paths over 70 potentially active volcanoes. Between 1950 and 1990 roughly 50,000 Alaskan glaciers, covering 75,110 km^sup 2^, collectively generated meltwater causing [similar to]7% of the total global sea level rise (0.14 mm/yr, Arendt et al., 2002). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that the Arctic including Alaska has warmed more than any other place on the planet over the last 50 winters (IPCC, 2007). Across Alaska's Arctic coastal plain, continuous permafrost, stable for over 1,000 years, is undergoing degradation (Jorgenson et al, 2006). A complete loss of Arctic sea ice is projected to occur between 2030 and 2300 (Stroeve et al., 2006). Winter sea-ice loss contributes to increasing coastal erosion from storm surges, threatening the existence of Alaskan villages. Chapin et al. (2005) have connected unprecedented forest disturbances, including unprecedented insect infestations of the boreal forest and increased frequency and intensity of Alaskan and Yukon interior forest fires, to warmer winters and summers. Transformation of Arctic ecosystems is underway.
Figure 1. Map of Alaska schools participating in GIS training through EDGE and its pilot programs.
Rural Alaska's school children have observed environmental change within their own young lifetimes. They watch as the permafrost beneath their villages melts, requiring, in some cases, annual relocation of their homes. They observe the erosion of their coastal bluffs and beaches; entire villages in some parts of Alaska are threatened with annihilation, and plans are being made to move whole towns to new sites, at huge expense. Alaska's students are impacted when villagers drown because the ice of frozen rivers, which constitutes the winter highway system of roadless northern Alaska, has become increasingly undependable, as is the sea ice that northern coastal hunters rely on. Students all over Alaska suffer from breathing the suffocating smoky summer air resulting from more frequent and larger forest fires; 2004 and 2005 saw the worst and the third worst fire seasons, respectively, in Alaska's recorded history. Urban students in areas such as Fairbanks notice increasingly jarring school bus rides due to roads buckling as underlying permafrost melts. Southern Alaskan students are watching neighborhood glaciers disappear and the expansion of invasive plants into coastal rainforests. Students can track these regional changes by using increasingly available web-accessible satellite imagery (Gens and Prakash, 2006; GINA, 2007), by comparing the landscape they see every day with the landscapes shown in historic pictures found in their family photo albums, and by listening to the stories of their elders. All too soon, today's students will become tomorrow's adults, responsible for the maintenance and replacement of existing state infrastructure. Replacement costs without consideration of climate change is estimated to be $32 billion by 2030 for roads, bridges, schools, power grids, and possibly the vital Trans-Alaska oil Pipeline. Additional damage resulting from climate change could add 10 to 20% to these costs (Larsen, Goldschmidt, et al, 2007)
THE EDGE PROGRAM
The EDGE program, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), engages Alaska's secondary science and math teachers and their middle and high school students in technology-rich, summer workshops with field-based explorations of local landscapes. Rigorous examination or changes resulting from warming climate and active tectonic processes lead to longer time-scale, independent student research explorations that are presented at a specially convened March EDGE Symposium as well as at the Southeast Alaska Regional Science Fair for the EDGE high school students. Winners of this science fair qualify to compete in the INTEL International Science and Engineering Fair in May.
EDGE fall activities include a follow-up online course for the teachers who also mentor their EDGE students through their semester scale, GIS-based science fair style scientific investigations during this time. In the spring all students and teachers return to UAS in Juneau for a March Science Symposium weekend. The interactions between university geology faculty and statewide secondary schools improve the interests, knowledge, and technical skills of students and teachers in the Earth sciences (Table 1). An important EDGE program aim is to increase the numbers of Alaska high school graduates interested in the earth sciences, especially those who will be first-generation college students., Additional EDGE program goals include expanding the GIS technological training available at the high school level that is now becoming an essential skill for Alaska's 21st century workforce. Improving the numbers and quality of students entering university Earth science programs will enrich the next generation of experts tasked with adapting to the many challenging aspects of our changing arctic landscape. Table 1. Earth System Science content knowledge quiz results from 3 years of EDGE middle school and high school teachers. Mean test scores improved by an average of 4 quiz points during the 3 years of summer workshops.
Table 2. EDGE teacher comments about improvements in their Earth science content knowledge and abilities to use GIS technology.
EDGE provides annual cohorts or Alaskan teachers with the Earth systems knowledge, global positioning system (GPS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology, and the long-term university- based technical support required to help them engage and mentor their own students through active research in the Earth sciences. EDGE students gain authentic science research experience and contribute their own observations and data to the science community through science fair projects. Interactions with circumpolar Earth scientists participating in the International Polar Year (2007- 2009) also enriches EDGE teachers and students (Prakash et al., 2006).
EDGE: A YEAR OF EARTH SCIENCE
June Summer Semester for EDGE Teachers 10-Day, 3-credit Field Science and GIS Lab Course - In June of 2005, 2006, and 2007 three groups of secondary school math and science teachers from around the state (Figure 1) participated in courses that focused on acquiring quantitative skills in Earth system science through study of geological field methods (Photo 1), the use of GPS and GIS techniques, and visualization of the entire virtual planet through Google Earth. The courses were held on the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) campus in Juneau which is located in North America's largest temperate rain forest, the Tongass National Forest. The region is nestled at the base of the Coast Range Mountains, which are rich with glacier-filled watersheds that empty into the Pacific along Alaska's Inside Passage. The clustering of diverse landscapes close to campus allowed EDGE Program participants to carry out glacier watershed-scale studies in geomorphology, glaciology, fluvial hydrology, and landscape ecology in an extraordinary natural laboratory with relatively simple logistics by Alaskan standards.
EDGE teachers followed the meltwater originating from Juneau Icefield glaciers through forested and newly incised, uplifting floodplains, into the expanding salt marshes bordering the North Pacific Ocean. Each teacher completed his or her own GIS project using original data they had collected in the field, and presented the results to peers. This established a model for authentic science activities that the teachers could carry out with their students during the following school year (Prakash et al., 2006).
August Summer Semester for EDGE Middle and High School Students 5- day, 2 Credit, Lower-division Field Science and GIS Lab Course - In August 2006, 27 pre-college students who had been recommended by their EDGE teachers traveled from all over the state to the UAS campus in Juneau. Students lived at the college. Introducing first- generation pre-college students, many of whom came from very small, isolated rural villages, to campus life was an important aspect of the EDGE program. Improvement in Math, Reading, Writing and (in 2008) Science subject scores on the Alaska State High School Qualifying exam is one of the goals for EDGE (Table 3)
The academic program was designed to introduce EDGE middle school and high school students to college-level Earth system science through classroom discussions and labs with instruction in field data collection methods that included exposure to the disciplines of glaciology, hydrology, and geomorphology. In computer labs the EDGE students worked with Google Earth and downloaded their GPS waypoints onto ArcGIS-generated modern and historic maps. Each high school student presented a proposal for a fall EDGE project to their peers and instructors, and each middle school student presented a summary slide show demonstrating the knowledge he or she had gained during their EDGE week (Connor et al., 2006).
Table 3. Spring 2007 results of high school graduation qualifying exams taken by Alaskan 10^sup th^ graders. Proficient and not- proficient percentages only include students that participated in the exams. Participation rate is calculated by dividing the number of students tested by the total number of students enrolled on the first day of testing. (Alaska Department of Education, 2007).
September to December Fall Semester for EDGE Teachers Upper Division, 3-credit, Online Advanced GIS, Geology Essentials, and Student Project Mentoring Follow-up Course - EDGE teacher education continued with a web-based, fall-semester-long geology course taught online by Connor in real time using Eluminate software. EDGE teachers gained additional Earth science and GIS content knowledge during weekly class meetings, lectures, discussions, homework assignments, discussion board postings, chapter quizzes, and by presenting slides of their student's progress on research projects. Assignments and activities were also directed toward helping EDGE teachers to successfully mentor their own EDGE students through EDGE project delineation, data collection, and analysis. A series of integrated and sequenced science fair project components and rubrics designed by Smith (2006) was used. During fall and early winter of 2006, the EDGE students formulated project hypotheses, generated maps of their study sites using ArcGIS , and created research logs as they collected appropriate data in their villages and towns. The students next analyzed their results and developed professional quality, poster-session style, large-format research posters that were printed on a large-format plotter at UAS, for presenting their findings.
March Spring Semester for all Teachers and Students EDGE Symposium and Southeast Alaska Regional Science Fair - In March 2007, an EDGE Symposium was convened at UAS in snowy Juneau. Eighteen out of the 24 original EDGE students returned to present their research posters at this event, along with 14 out of 15 EDGE teacher mentors (Connor et al., 2006).
At the one-day EDGE Symposium, students first presented their results in a poster session to their EDGE peers and EDGE teacher- mentors. Students and their posters were judged by UAS Environmental Science program faculty and undergraduates, and local scientists from federal and state agencies. The EDGE student presenters assumed the role of "expert" while explaining their science research to 4th and 5th grade students. In turn, the elementary school children received glimpses of their own possible futures as high school science fair participants. EDGE high school students entered their projects into the Southeast Alaska Regional Science Fair which was held the day after the EDGE Symposium, and was targeted specifically for high school students. Examples of selected EDGE student research projects are provided in Figure 2a-d.
The 14 EDGE teachers served as Southeast Alaska Regional Science Fair judges. They benefited from training in science project judging. The EDGE teachers also experienced a "peer review" of their own mentoring efforts as their EDGE students' work was evaluated by federal and state agency researchers and university science faculty.
EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT
EDGE Program evaluation was conducted using surveys, quizzes, test, interviews, presentations and publications. Though the methods to assess teachers and students are similar, the tools are altered slightly for the two audiences. The assessment methods specifically used by the EDGE program include:
* Pre- and post-workshop attitude survey to determine if participant opinions about Earth science and GIS technology changed as a result of participating in the EDGE Program.
* Pre-post workshop content knowledge questionnaire (geo- quizzes) to measure improvement in participants' Earth system science and technology content knowledge. Post workshop technology usage surveys to determine the effect of EDGE on teacher use of GIS technology in classrooms and in student projects.
* Weekly geology course content tests taken during the teachers fall 15-week, online course.
* Post-workshop and post-symposium surveys for all participants, and science fair judges' evaluations of EDGE student research projects.
EDGE program evaluation is ongoing but initial indicators suggest that our introduction of the use of spatial data, in a field science context, and providing the necessary technology and training is having positive results.
Teacher Content Knowledge and Resource Usage Improvement - Analysis of 2005-2007 EDGE teacher summer workshop quizzes indicates that all high school and middle school teachers significantly improved their Earth system science content knowledge with a mean quiz score increase of 16% (Table 1). No statistical differences were identified between middle school and high school teachers, although the mean quiz score improvement of the middle school teachers exhibited a higher standard deviation (Table 1).
Initial teacher survey results indicated that the teachers had expanded the use of a variety of resources into their learning activities beyond materials available in the textbook. Teachers also increased the number of classroom activities that encouraged students to be self-directed learners and enabled students to demonstrate their understanding of science through authentic Earth science research. At one Juneau middle school, two EDGE-trained teachers provided over 500 eighth graders with one month of GIS instruction accompanied by Earth science field activities. EDGE teacher comments are listed in Table 2. Professional and Personal Technology Use Teachers reported growth in:
* knowledge of current and emerging technologies related to GIS, GPS, software packages, computers and accessories.
* the ability to use technology for distance delivery of lectures helping them to reach out to a wider student audience.
* the ability to use technology for interacting with parents, networking with peers and professionals, participating in professional development activities, and engaging in lifelong learning.
Community Involvement - The place-based nature of the EDGE projects encouraged teachers to interact with local scientists and researchers. The projects connected students to various community resources, such as federal, state and local industries. Industry members provided EDGE participants with geospatial data, published reports, and professional expertise. Involvement in some local native industry projects helped participants realize the significance of blending new technology with traditional practices in a culturally sensitive manner. Teachers, in particular, recognized the significance of incorporating local Alaska Native cultural values and beliefs when designing learning activities.
EDGE Students - Evaluation of EDGE student progress is underway. Following the August 2006 workshop, EDGE student pre- and post- course test results showed a 60% improvement in geologic content knowledge for high school students and a 100% improvement for middle school students.
The March 2007 EDGE Symposium and Southeast Alaska Regional Science Fair provided rural middle school and high school students with their first opportunity to present their research results to a larger statewide audience. Rural high school students gained the opportunity to practice for and compete in a regional science fair, and the chance to qualify for science fair honors and a place at the Intel International Science Fair. Two of the EDGE teams won local awards for their projects and the EDGE students received special recognition for their participation. In total, 24 middle and high school students completed and presented their own semester-scale research projects. The Juneau-based fair was in turn enriched by participation of students and teachers from outside of Alaska's capital city and became for the first time a truly regional science fair.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Through EDGE and other NSF-funded geoscience education programs, Alaska's Earth science community is changing the culture of Earth systems science education at the key middle and high school levels (Stephens et al., 2006; Hanks et al., 2007).
The day is fast approaching when vacancies in the Earth science- trained workforce will be filled by workers with expertise in hydrology, remote sensing, geomorphology, petroleum, mining, geochemistry, and GIS. EDGE seeks to help Alaskans prepare for future job opportunities by increasing the number and quality of Alaskan students in the Earth sciences.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to acknowledge the primary support of the National Science Foundation Geoscience Education Division Grant 0506671, the U.S. Department of Education Partnership Grant to our colleague Maria Brownlee, and support from NASA through the Alaska Space Grant Program.. We thank Candace O'Connor and all JGE reviewers for their helpful comments.
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Cathy Connor Environmental Science Program, University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau, AK 99801, cathy.connor@uas.alaska.edu
Anupma Prakash Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK 99775-7320, prakash@gi.alaska.edu
Copyright National Association of Geoscience Teachers Mar 2008
(c) 2008 Journal of Geoscience Education. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Journal of Geoscience Education
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