Tag Archives: secondary science

CliMES project media and publication

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The NSF-funded CliMES project was featured last week on NET, Nebraska’s PBS & NPR Stations. The story provides an overview of the project, how it came about in Nebraska, and how the CliMES curriculum looks in the classrooms we’ve been working in. Many thanks to NET reporter Becca Costello for taking an interest in this project and pursuing a story that reflects perspectives of project teachers and the many stakeholders who have been involved. To learn more about the research-practitioner partnership that has made this project possible, involving UNL, NASA-GISS, and Lincoln Public Schools, please check out Chap. 3 of the recently released edited book, entitled Teaching Climate Change in the United States.

Forbes, C.T., Chandler, M., Blake, J., Bhattacharya, D., Carroll-Steward, K., Johnson, V., DeGrand, T., Mason, W., and Murrow, B. (2020).  Fostering climate literacy with global climate models in secondary science classrooms: Insights from a collaborative partnership.  In J. Henderson & A. Drewes (Eds.), Teaching Climate Change in the United States. Routledge; New York.

First CliMES project publication

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The CliMES team is excited to share our first project publication, which appears in the December issue of the Green Schools Catalyst Quarterly, a publication of the Green Schools National Network. In this article, we provide an overview of the CliMES project, as well as a primer on the findings from the literature review in which we are currently engaged focused on K-16 climate education. This issue, entitled Climate Literacy: Educating with the Future in Mind, focuses on climate education and includes contributions from an array of esteemed science education colleagues, including some of our CliMES project advisory board members. We very much appreciate the opportunity to contribute to this important issue and the broader conversation about climate education in K-12 classrooms.

Bhattacharya, D., Carroll-Steward, K., Sutter, A., Chandler, M., & Forbes, C.T. (2018). Climate literacy: Insights from research on K-16 climate education. Green Schools Catalyst Quarterly, V(4), 26-35.

Fulbright Research Trip to Kiel, Germany

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This past week I traveled to Kiel, Germany, to begin work on my Fulbright-related research.  This work focuses on data from the 2015 administration of the The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in which 28 million 15-year-old (secondary) students in 72 countries completed the PISA.  In 2015, the focus of the PISA was science, with approximately half of the assessment devoted to science items. We are exploring observed relationships between student achievement as related to scientific literacy outcomes and reported instructional practices of high school science teachers.  A special thanks to Knut Nuemann for hosting me at the IPN Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Kiel and to and Anja Schiepe-Tiska, from the Centre for International Student Assessment (ZIB) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), for traveling to Kiel for a few days to work with us.  I very much look forward to the ongoing collaboration on this important work.

2018-2019 Fulbright U.S. Scholar

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I am delighted and honored to have been named a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar.  Through the generous support of a Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant, I will travel to Germany in the upcoming 2 years to collaborate with researchers at the IPN Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Kiel and the Centre for International Student Assessment (ZIB) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, to conduct analyses on data from the 2015 administration of the The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). As an integrated research/teaching project, I will not only have the opportunity to conduct PISA-focused research, but also engage in graduate and undergraduate teaching at one or both institutions.  This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, both professional and personal, and I am grateful for the support of the Fulbright Program and the German-American Fulbright Commission.  A special thanks to Knut Nuemann and Anja Schiepe-Tiska, as well as colleagues and administrators at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for paving the way for me to pursue this work.

Kicking off CliMES collaborative work with LPS teachers

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At the end of September, our CliMES team came together with a group of high school teachers from our district partner – Lincoln Public Schools – to begin collaborating on development of the CliMES curriculum module.  We are working to develop a 6-week module designed around EzGCM for LPS’ 9th-grade Geoscience course.  The proposed module will be aligned with national, state, and district standards, with a particular emphasis on HS-ESS3-5:

Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.

We’re looking forward to continuing these discussions and working with our collaborating teachers as we move forward with development of the curriculum module, planned for pilot implementation in spring, 2018.

 

NSF DRK-12 project funded – CliMES

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I am excited to announce our new project funded by the National Science Foundation’s Discovery Research K-12 program (DRL 1720838 and 1719872). In the High School Students’ Climate Literacy through Epistemology of Scientific Modeling (CliMES) project, we will engage in a 4-year, mixed-methods, design-based research project to investigate classroom use of EzGCM (Easy Global Climate Modeling), a web-based climate modeling suite designed to provide non-scientists experiences with climate modeling. We are developing and implementing a 6-week climate science module for secondary science classrooms designed around EzGCM. Each year, we will collect and analyze evidence of students’ model-based reasoning about climate, including pre-/post- measures of students’ conceptual and epistemic knowledge, curriculum-embedded modeling tasks, interviews, and videorecorded observations of instruction to investigate two research questions: 1) how do secondary students develop epistemic and conceptual knowledge about the Earth’s climate and climate science? and 2) how do secondary science teachers support students’ use of EzGCM to develop epistemic and conceptual knowledge about the Earth’s climate and climate science?  The project will impact over 50 secondary teachers and 3000 secondary students over four years and leverages a new partnership between Columbia University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, promoting cross-fertilization between climate scientists and science educators, in partnership with Nebraska school districts.