• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Advancing the REVOLUTION: Using Earth Systems Science to Prepare Elementary School Teachers in an Urban Environment

Posted on: Sunday, 10 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

ABSTRACT

The Earth and Space sciences provide opportunities for content learning in inquiry-based classrooms, emphasizing ways in which science is relevant to the lives of both students and teachers. We are successfully using an Earth Systems approach to prepare preservice elementary school teachers in understanding science content and pedagogy with emphases in technology and mathematics. Using Lake Pontchartrain as the unifying theme across four courses, students learn not only science content, but also scientific process. Students perform research projects on Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, and develop models of changes in water quality that are directly comparable to longitudinal data being collected by research laboratories, Our approach fosters students': a) understanding of science and the scientific process, b) self- confidence in teaching science, c) knowledge of state science- education standards, d) ability to accurately research and prepare lessons on science topics, and e) positive attitudes towards scientific fields of study. Accomplishing these goals required on- going collaboration between the Colleges of Sciences and Education. Surveying and field-testing results suggest that the pre-service teachers in our classes are likely to apply the approach used in our courses to science teaching in their own classrooms.

BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW

Nationally, science literacy among elementary school teachers is of critical concern. Whereas secondary school science teachers are expected to be science subject specialists in the subjects they teach, elementary teachers are expected to be competent in all science subject areas, and to be able to develop standards-based lessons in inquiry-based classrooms using appropriate technology, at age appropriate levels. Furthermore, the grade-levels to which these teachers are assigned can change annually. Thus, as they transition from a teacher preparation program to being in their own classrooms, elementary teachers must have sufficient knowledge and flexibility to teach a variety of science topics at multiple levels of complexity.

As many children decide if they like or dislike science by middle school (Kahle 1.996; Roth and McGinn, 1998), it is imperative that we work to improve science teaching in the elementary grades. If we truly wish to promote widespread scientific literacy, this emphasis on improving elementary science education is especially important in regions where significant portions of the student body are from groups traditionally under-represented in science. The southeastern United States is a region where population densities are comprised of > 20% racial and ethnic minorities (US Census, 2001), and is also the region with the traditionally lowest performing school districts (NCPPHE, 2002). Ensuring equal opportunity and access to high- quality science education for all students requires us to work diligently to improve the teaching and resources available in these poor performing districts.

There is a substantial body of research literature that focuses on science teacher preparation and attempts that have been made to provide science teachers with the knowledge, skills and dispositions they will need to enact inquiry based approaches in their own classrooms as novice teachers (Gabel, 1994). However, only a small fraction of this literature has focused on the unique needs of teachers who are preparing to teach in low-performing and high poverty urban school settings (Barton, 2001). Teacher preparation and teacher professional development is always a demanding task (Richardson and Placier, 2001), but becomes even more challenging when it involves teaching the culturally and linguistically diverse students who comprise a growing percentage of today's urban classrooms (Garcia, 1999; Lee and Fradd, 1998). At the same time that teacher preparation programs must adapt to these shifting classroom demographics, they must also take into consideration the growing importance that is now being placed upon standards-based instruction and igh-stakes assessments. In other words, meaningful science teacher preparation must be conceptualized and enacted with an eye toward shifting educational policy and accountability contexts (Cohen and Hill, 2000). These pressures now affect all teachers, but are felt most strongly in institutions that prepare teachers for urban schools.

We undertook the current project with the hope that we could help our preservice teachers feel prepared for just such pressures as they exit our program and enter their first teaching positions, many of which will be in challenging urban classrooms. One of the models we relied upon was Barstow and Geary's (2002) "Blueprint for Change," a document intended to improve the development, implementation, and general knowledge of Earth and Space science education as a means of improving science literacy. We embrace this blueprint as a way to provide context to science content through attempts to make science relevant to the lives of students, teachers, and the community at large. Within such a framework, teacher preparation and professional development must no longer bee seen solely as the responsibility of Colleges of Education, but rather, the responsibility of the university more broadly.

At the University of New Orleans, the Colleges of Education and Sciences have been sinvolved in numerous collaborations involving teacher preparation for more than ten years. Currently, the goals of our collaborations are to:

* Provide and prepare K-12 teachers with the necessary content and pedagogy skills in science, mathematics, and technology;

* Create a learning environment that positively promotes teachers' perceptions and attitudes towards science and science teaching through contextualizing science within an Earth Systems paradigm;

* Provide teachers with examples of best teaching practices in all required science content and pedagogy courses;

* Provide teachers with opportunities to practice their craft through peer teaching and practicum placements prior to required student teaching assignments; and

* Provide teachers with adequate preparation in the application of state and national science education standards and benchmarks in preparing lesson plans.

Our approach builds on the NSTA's concept of the spiral curriculum. We reintroduce Earth Systems concepts over a series of four courses. By presenting these ideas in ways that are layered and articulated, we are providing the students with competencies necessary to effectively understand science concepts, while also modeling for them an approach that they can use in preparing their own lessons.

Within this article, we discuss the:

1) Collaborations we have undertaken in the hope that this will prove useful to faculty in other universities who are at the initial stages of such collaborations;

2) Outcomes of our program to date - encouraging initial results we can point to in terms of student attitudes, beliefs, and practices;

3) Areas where our collaborations are still in need of strengthening (including barriers we have faced); and

4) Plans for the future, both in terms of our teaching and our research in this arena.

Attaining our collaborative goals necessitated programmatic changes, including the design of three new physical science courses that specifically target preservice elementary school teachers, and the redesign of the teaching methods course. All of these courses model the same inquiry-based instructional practices that we wish our students to use in their own future classrooms.

While not formally team-taught, these courses model faculty collaboration to our students, as science and science education faculty often participate in each other's classes and spend time in each other s buildings. We cannot overemphasize the importance of this cooperation. We provide the students with a sense of community as they come to see science and science education practitioners as partners interested in their learning in a holistic way, not just within the confines of one particular course or one particular department. We also recognize that for our teaching to be effective, our students must find the content relevant to their lives, and they must see explicit connections between what they are learning in content and methods courses. Therefore, we have organized these courses around a single theme: the environment of the Lake Pontchartrain region (Figure 1), emphasizing an Earth Systems approach.

Figure 1. NASA satellite view of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River including the location of the University of New Orleans, (courtesy: NASA/JPL).

CONTEXT OF THE PROJECT - LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN BASIN

Located on the southeastern end of Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta System, New Orleans rests between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain with University of New Orleans located on the south-shore of the lake (Figure 1). The proximity of Lake Pontchartrain, within easy walking distance from any building on campus, makes it an excellent natural laboratory for learning science. Lake Pontchartrain is actually a shallow, brackish-wa\ter estuary with fresh water from bayous, rain, and run-off mixing with saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico.

Climatologically, southeastern Louisiana is in a semi-tropical zone. Because the average elevation of New Orleans is below sea level, the impacts of major storms, i.e., tropical storms and hurricanes, is of serious concern to the citizenry. Thus, flood control is an important industry in this region.

Human impacts on the region have had dramatic affects on the local environment. Mississippi River management by the Army Corps of Engineers, oil exploration, and population growth have reshaped the region. Non-point source pollution results in the closing of certain stretches of Lake Pontchartrain to swimming, especially after storm events. We infuse these and other related topics throughout our courses to provide the context and relevancy that we feel is so important to science education. Studying this environment also provides numerous opportunities for pre-service teachers to apply their growing scientific skills to other content areas, such as history, human geography, mathematics, and language arts.

OVERVIEW OF THE COURSES

In each of the science content and methods courses we developed, our pre-service teachers explore scientific methods, science as a process, conceptual understanding of science, the National Science Education Standards, and the state science benchmarks. Our students also consider the interrelationships between curriculum, instruction, and assessment as the three pillars of the teaching process. Students work in cooperative groups on specific problems, communicate the findings of their projects in various ways, and incorporate a range of educational technologies in their teaching and learning. Work within cooperative learning groups emphasizes Problem-Based Learning assignments (Alien, 1997) and laboratory analyses that model the natural environment (Gill and Burke, 1999; Barab and Hay, 2001). In addition, computer-based laboratories and internet assignments help the students extend their learning beyond what is discussed in class and improves their skills using technology.

Figure 2. Students' rankings of elementary school courses that they prefer to teach.

Figure 3. The conservative mixing model curve created by students for the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

Table 1. Demographic information of students enrolled in SCI1012.

Field trips to Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, and other nearby waterways, where students analyze water samples, make observations of weather and surface-water conditions, and practice wildlife and plant identification, are key components of these courses. In addition, students are introduced to local informal science education organizations, through mini-workshops conducted during class. These organizations provide curricular materials appropriate for elementary school science teachers and contacts that the teachers can call upon in the future.

Science Content Courses - Student demographic data from two of the science content courses are given in Table 1. This data reflects the overall distribution of students enrolled in the College of Education. A majority of the students are female, with a wide age range (average age is in the low to mid-twenties). Education majors at UNO are required to take 15 credit hours in science: four of these credit hours must be in Biology. All other sciences (Physics, Chemistry, and Earth and Space science) that our students will need to teach are taught in the series of three redesigned physical science courses. As the use of mathematics in science is emphasized in these courses, the mathematics classes for elementary school teachers are prerequisites for enrollment.

The three science content courses (Physical Science for Elementary School Teachers I, II, and III [SCI1012, SCI1013, and SCI1014, respectively]) cover specific interrelated science themes. SCI1012 is the fundamental course that is a prerequisite for the remaining science content courses and the teaching methods course. This course emphasizes the diversity of people who become scientists, the scientific method, and the role of teachers in the learning process for students, chemistry especially in regards to atoms and molecules, and solutions of water. The size, structure, composition, and age of the Earth, and the processes that impact the local environment are the Earth Systems themes included in this course.

Specifically, the students perform water quality analyses on samples from the lake. The data that they collect (Table 2) are compared with real-time data collected from a monitoring station operated by the Louisiana University Marine Consortium (LUMCON) and posted on the internet. Using data collected from Bayou St. Jean as the source of fresh water, and LUMCON data for a site within the Gulf of Mexico (salt-water source), the students develop a conservative mixing model for the lake (Figure 3).

Table 2. Comparing data students collect with that of LUMCON.

Figure 4. Ms. JoAnn Burke of the Lake Pontchartrain basin Foundation leading a classroom workshop. One of the authors (Hall) is seen to the right.

Figure 5: Graphical representation of the results of the data collected with questionnaires at the end of the fall 2001 and spring 2002 semesters (SCI1012). The columns represent the mean values with Ic/ error bars.

SCI1013 emphasizes forces, energy, electricity, and magnetism. Isostacy, plate tectonics, the Earth as a magnet, connections between atmospheric and oceanic circulation and the impacts of major storms on the local environment, are the Earth systems themes presented in this course. During this course's field trip to Lake Pontchartrain, the students observe the relationship between wind velocity/wind stress on the surface features of the lake.

SCI1014 emphasizes waves and wave processes, including light and sound. Ocean waves, earthquakes, and marine seismic analysis are the Earth systems themes presented in this course. The field experience for this class has the students observing wave patterns on the lake, including qualitative estimates of wave height and speed, reflection and refraction, and 3-dimensional interference patterns made as waves interact with each other.

Course materials and resources are available to the students online using the course-development software Blackboard, and we point the reader to our website for more detailed information (an example can be found at homepage.mac.com/frhall).

Science Teaching Methods Course - The revised elementary science teaching methods course is now aligned with the science content courses, emphasizing locally contextualized earth systems themes, inquiry-based learning, student-directed assessment strategies and the integrated use of emergent educational technology. For example, the class takes several field trips to local urban parks and bayous, where students continue to study the central role that water plays in local and regional environments by conducting field-based wetlands site analyses, pollution analyses, and surveys of aquatic and wading birds. Using the knowledge, skills and dispositions they have developed across these courses, students then work to develop multimedia, interdisciplinary units, and field test sample lessons in urban elementary school classrooms. Having our pre-service teachers practice the kind of teaching that we have been modeling for them provides a valuable experience, as they come to realize both the challenges and the rewards of inquiry-based teaching with a localized Earth systems focus.

Working in classrooms with students who have rarely experienced science as anything other than readings out of text books, our pre- service teachers engage these children in "walking field trips" to study the air, water, soil and organisms available on the school grounds and in the surrounding neighborhoods. While field trips to the river or the lake are exciting, our teachers loam that ongoing studies of what is taking place right outside the classroom window can also be extremely meaningful to students because these experiences are contextualized in the children's daily lived experiences. This developing understanding of, and interest in, the functioning of ' everyday science" in the world around us is at the heart of what we hope to accomplish with our students.

FINAL EXAMINATIONS

Final examinations in these courses are both performance- and project-based, and are designed such that the students demonstrate learning of the necessary content and pedagogy, can perform their own research on science topics, and can develop and teach their own lessons using inquiry-based methods with inclusion of the state science standards and benchmarks.

Table 3. Survey questions asked at the end of the fall 2001 and spring 2002 semesters (SCI1012).

Students enrolled in the science content courses must research topics relevant to, but not the same as, those discussed during the semester, prepare lesson plans and assessment tools, and then teach lessons to their peers, targeted at the fourth grade level. Grading of the final exam emphasizes the accuracy of the science content that is taught, as well as students' abilities to infuse multiple learning styles, relevant science education content standards, and knowledge of the cross-curricular nature of the topics they choose, including references to other physical and life sciences as well as arts and humanities.

Students enrolled in the teaching methods course work in small groups to create interactive, multimedia CD and DVD teaching units on earth systems themes. These units are revised and refined based on the pilot testing done in the elementary school classrooms, and are then distributed to their classmates for potential future use. These students also participate in a mock job interview at an imaginary science magnet elementary school in which they must synthesize and communicate what they have learned abo\ut effective science teaching throughout the series of four courses.

Inclusion of Local Informal Science Education Organizations - Another of our commitments is that our pre-service teachers learn what local resources are available to support their teaching of local environmental themes. An informal survey of a population of teachers from this region suggested to us that the majority of K-8 teachers: a) are not aware of the existence of local organizations that support science teaching; b) do not know how to contact these organizations; and/or c) are "afraid" to contact them.

To counter this reality, during every semester, a local science/ environmental education-based organization is asked to come to class and conduct a mini-workshop (Figure 5). These workshops are open to all pre-service elementary teachers on campus and have been both popular and successful. Representatives bring books, videos, study guides, and other materials that the students can. use once they become teachers. Also, the content presented by these groups and organizations reinforces the content that is taught in class, improving the students' confidence as "scientists" and science teachers.

ASSESSING PROGRAM OUTCOMES TO DATE

Assessment of program outcomes has been multifaceted and ongoing. Student attitudes and beliefs towards science and science teaching, as well as their actual teaching practices were measured during the fall 2001 and spring 2002 semesters. In the science content course, the students were asked to grade on a scale of O - 4 (disagree - agree) nine questions or statements (Table 3). We chose to set the scale from 0-4 instead of the more often used 1-5 since the "4- point scale" is familiar to students from their own assessment in university courses (i.e. A=4, C=2, F=0). Thus, we asked the students to grade our work in the same manner that we grade their work.

The first three questions we asked dealt with student attitudes towards science prior to the academic semester. Clearly, having such information beginning at the point when students enter the teacher education program would be best; however, such surveys require consensus beyond the level of our cluster of courses. Therefore, we polled our students on the first day of the first science content course, and found that science typically ranks in the top 5 of courses that the students wish to teach (Figure 2). We asked these questions in another format at the end of the semester.

Questions 4-6 dealt with the students' confidence in understanding science, their desire to teach science and the use of Earth systems/environmental themes in their understanding of science. The final three questions dealt with students' attitudes towards using external resources for assistance when they begin teaching, questions that relate to students' awareness of local environmental and science education organizations that can benefit their teaching. In addition to the focus questions, anonymous comments were also solicited as part of the survey.

Surveys, anecdotal comments and observations of our students in their science content courses indicate that our collaboration is having a positive influence on the students' attitudes towards, beliefs about, and practices in science and science teaching. The results of surveys in the first content course demonstrated that in both the fall 2001 and spring 2002 semesters, the students had a wide-range of beliefs about science teaching. Students in the spring 2002 semester appeared to have had more initially negative feelings towards science than the fall 2001 group prior to me beginning of the semester (questions 1-3). Both fall and spring semester classes consistently gave fairly high scores (generally greater than 3.0 on a 4 point scale) on the last six questions. Although the scores were a bit higher for the spring 2002 semester, both semester classes responded in ways that implied recognition of the value of adopting the Earth systems-infused model of science teaching that we advocate.

Anonymous comments were generally positive with very few negative comments (3 out of 34). One example of a negative comment was,

"In this course I feel the whole area on saturation and solutions, etc. was too confusing, too long and very boring. The lady who came to talk about the lake was real interesting and I appreciated learning more about the lake. However, I feel we should nave gone into more topics, like the ones in the final exams, to make this class more interesting and fun."

Thus, even when students had negative comments about the course, they also found positive aspects that hopefully will keep them interested in science and science teaching when they enter the classroom.

Examples of positive comments included,

"I am not as nearly as afraid of teaching as I was before, and realize that I would definitely have benefited from having teachers who made science fun,"

and

"This class didn't affect my views because I already have a deep appreciation for science. If anything it reinforced my views a bit."

Equally important, we have been receiving unsolicited comments from the local environmental organizations who are very excited about coming back to perform the mini-workshops. For example, a presenter from the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation (www.saveourlake.org) told us:

"When I got back [to HQ], I told them that with these [mini- ]workshops, we can impact 50 teachers at one time. Where else...[will we have the opportunity]...to impact this many teachers [at the same time]. WE WANT TO COME BACK EVERY SEMESTER!"

In fact, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation has accepted our invitation to participate in our class exploration of Lake Pontchartrain each semester that the first content course is taught.

In the teaching methods course, ethnographic data were collected during the students' school-based teaching practicum to explore how (and if) students were able to enact their evolving attitudes and beliefs about science in their actual teaching practices. Numerous classroom observations were made and students were required to respond to prompts in a reflective teaching journal. Findings from this portion of the project are reported more fully elsewhere (Buxton, 2003). There were many instances of our students successfully developing and enacting science lessons that built on the knowledge, skills and dispositions they developed in the science content courses. The students also came to realize, however, that they still had much to learn about becoming effective urban elementary science teachers. For example, during the spring 2002 semester, after a day of teaching, one student reflected in her teaching journal,

"The whole experience has been different than I expected. I expected that these [S1'1 grade] children would not be particularly interested in some of the simple things we planned, like comparing wetland soil to soil from their playground or collecting plants from our walking field trip to the bayou and then planting them in a classroom aquarium, and they were fascinated by them. On the other hand, I expected the children to be very interested in some of the more complex things we planned, like learning to key out wetlands tree species to make a wetlands plant guide, and they hated it! I mean we spent a whole weekend going around to collect those samples! I find it really confusing. I've always thought that I had a sense of what kids find interesting, but right now, I'm rethinking this. The things that we connected to the truly local - their playground, their neighborhood were the best received. To us, the wetlands where we collected the plant samples are local because they're just like ten miles from here, but to these kids, they might as well have been in the next state. When you say make it locally relevant, I'm learning mat you mean really local!" (Paula's teaching journal, 4/ 21/02).

As Paula makes clear in this reflection, there are many nuances to becoming a truly effective science teacher in high-poverty urban schools. Even experienced teachers often struggle to engage students and help them to experience their academic strengths and potentials. It should be obvious, then, that novice teachers will be greatly challenged. We believe, however, that the series of courses we have created for our pre-service teachers will provide them with the basic tools necessary for them to succeed as urban science educators. We hope that among other things they will all learn to do as Paula seemed to do - to critically analyze her science teaching in light of the question how to better connect her understanding of science content, processes and standards to her students' interests, abilities and lived experiences. We firmly believe that an Earth systems framework can provide help for this challenge.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The fundamental question we are currently asking ourselves as urban science teacher educators is the degree to which we have been successful in changing teachers' practices to be more closely aligned with our vision of meaningful science teaching in today's urban elementary school settings. To answer this question, we need to look at teachers who have graduated from our program and are now in their first years of teaching. What are they doing in terms of teaching science? How are their practices aligned (or not aligned) with the training they received based on our vision of science teaching grounded in an Earth Systems framework? And, how can we improve upon a process that is already showing desired outcomes?

There are also issues beyond the pedagogical training we give our teachers that impact their ability to perform in the manner we desire. Are these new teachers getting the kinds of support and encouragement from administration and other faculty to use inquiry- based methods? Will they have access to the materials and supplies necessary for this kind of teaching? Will the perceived necessity of "teaching to th\e high-stakes tests" limit the teachers' ability to enact an inquiry-based pedagogy grounded in local Earth systems? Each of these issues is part of the larger question of systemic reform that is at the heart of the National Science Education Standards. To ensure our desired goal of improved K-6 student learning of science requires that we take a holistic view of the education process. To this end, we are working with school districts and inservice teachers, in addition to our pre-service teachers, so as to influence their views of science teaching as well.

CONCLUSIONS

Our experiences in attempting to integrate the science content and science methods courses taken by pre-service elementary school teachers in an urban university point to the importance of attending to the local context(s) in which learning takes place, and to the role that each individual teacher plays in constructing personal meanings of science content and reform-based science teaching practices. Students are always active transformers and constructors of the curriculum, instruction and assessment presented to them. In order to prepare teachers who can provide meaningful science learning in urban classroom contexts, we first need to shape these teachers' attitudes and beliefs about science and science teaching. We have found that strategies grounded in locally contextualized Earth systems science perspectives can help us accomplish this goal.

State-mandated high-stakes assessments with consequences such as grade retention and withholding of the high school diploma are spreading rapidly throughout the country. We recognize that improving K-6 students' knowledge of science requires improving the knowledge and abilities of their teachers. Modeling an Earth systems approach to science in our own teaching seems to be one way of changing our students' attitudes and beliefs about science. It is our hope that these changes will translate into changing teaching practices as well. At the same time, we are well aware that the current generation of teachers faces some significant barriers to the implementation of such an approach. There is a prevailing educational climate that has schools moving away from a willingness to allow teachers to make curricular, instructional and assessment decisions based on their contextualized understandings of the needs of the students in their classes. All of us involved in the preparation of science teachers must continue to collaborate and to explore the interaction of educational context and standards-based education if we are to realize the goals of the national systemic reform movement in science education. We hope that by sharing our own experiences of our collaboration across sciences and education coursework for pre-service teachers, we can contribute something to this broader discourse. We encourage faculty at other institutions to do the same.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge Mr. Wendell Thompson for his tireless efforts is assisting us in developing the courses discussed in this text. We also acknowledge Ms. JoAnn Burke of the Lake Pontchartrain basin Foundation, the J. L. Scott Marine Education Center and Aquarium, and students participants from the University of New Orleans. We also extend our gratitude to Dr. Julie Libarkin for her encouragement and assistance in the completion of this article. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation: NSF-0085392.

REFERENCES

Allen, D., 1997, Bringing Problem-Based Learning to the Introductory Biology Classroom. In A. P. McNeal and C. D'Avaanzo (eds.), Student Active Science: Models of Innovation in College Science Teaching, Saunders College Publishing, Philadelphia, p. 259- 278.

Barab, S. A. and Hay, K. E., 2001, Doing science at the elbows of experts: Issues related to the science apprenticeship camp, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, v. 38, p. 70-102.

Barton, A.C., 2001, Science education in urban settings: seeking new ways of praxis through critical ethnography, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, v. 38, p. 899-917.

Gabel, D.L. (ed), 1994, Handbook of research on science teaching and learning, New York, McMillan.

Barstow, D. and Geary, E., 2002, Blueprint for Change: Report on the National Conference on the Revolution in Earth and Space Science Education, TERC, Cambridge (MA), 98 p.

Buxton, C, 2003, Shared Responsibility: Working to Reconcile "Authentic" Learning and High-Stakes Accountability in a "Low- Performing7 Urban Elementary School Context. Paper presented at the 2003 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 25, Chicago, Illinois.

Cohen, D. K., and Hill, H. C., 2000, Instructional policy and classroom performance: The mathematics reform in California, Teachers College Record, v. 102, p. 294-34.

Garca, E., 1999, Student cultural diversity: Understanding and meeting the challenge (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Gill, R. A. and Burke I. C., 1999, Using an Environmental Science Course to Promote Scientific Literacy: Expanding Critical-Thinking Skills Beyond the Environmental Sciences, Journal of College Science Teaching, v. 29, p. 105-110.

Kahle, J., 1996, Opportunities and obstacles: Science education in the school, in, C. Davis (ed.) The equity education: Fostering the advancement of women in the sciences, mathematics and engineering. San Francisco, CA, Jossey Bass.

Lee, O., and Fradd, S. H., 1998, Science for all, including students from non-English language backgrounds, Educational Researcher, v. 27, p. 12-21.

National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 2002, Measuring up 2002: The state-by-state report card for higher education, San Jose, CA, National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Richardson, V, and Placier, P., 2001, Teacher change. In D. V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed), Washington, DC, American Educational Research Association, p. 905- 950.

Roth, W-M. and McGinn, M., 1998, undelete science education:/ lives/work/voices, Journal of Research in Science Education, v. 35, p 399-421.

Totten, I.M., 2002, Louisiana, A Leader in Earth and Space Science Education, EOS Transaction of the American Geophysical Union.

U.S. Census Bureau, 2001, Population Profiles of the United Stated: 1999, 89 p.

Frank R. Hall Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA 70148, frhall@uno.edu

Cory A. Buxton University of Miami, Miami, FL 33124, cbuxton@miami.edu

Copyright National Association of Geoscience Teachers Sep 2004

More News in this Category