Challenges and opportunities for K-12 earth science education

Abstract

In the US, most rules dealing with pre-college (K-12) education vary by state, despite national laws and standards that have been developed. In some states (including Colorado, where I live), high school students usually don’t take any Earth science, and even where Earth Science courses are common, they are often taught by teachers who were trained in other fields. Several of the papers in this issue discuss recommendations for content and approaches to teaching Earth, space, and atmospheric sciences to pre-college students, as well as challenges and opportunities for K-12 educators. As John Lanicci and Sarah McCorrison argue, K-12 education has the potential to help many people (both students and their parents) prepare to deal with hazardous weather. Silvia-Jessica Mostacedo-Marsovic and coauthors examined water-related standards for K-12 education that have been promoted by US and international groups. Their analysis describes which grade levels are typically associated with which content. Nancy Price analyzed the pairs of practices and crosscutting concepts for the Earth and Space Sciences in the Next Generation Science Standards, and found that some important aspects of the Earth sciences could be left out if those pairs become the only basis for curriculum design. She recommends some other combinations that could be used to develop lesson plans that teach concepts such as deep time, visualization, spatial reasoning, and large spatial scales. Two papers use standardized test results to consider potential groups to target for K-12 professional development programs. In 31 states and the District of Columbia, the Praxis® standardized test is used to screen future teachers for content knowledge. Rachel Ndembera and coauthors analyzed data from ten years of exams to determine which Earth and Space Science subtopics were the least well-understood, and which groups of future teachers struggled most on the exam. They recommend designing professional development programs for teachers who majored in Education and in non-STEM fields, and especially supporting teachers in covering topics related to the history of Earth and its life forms. In New York state, an unusually large proportion of high school students (70%) take a statewide standardized assessment in Earth Science. Christine Schlendorf and coauthors analyzed the results of that exam to look at the characteristics of schools and teachers in relation to the performance on the exam. Surprisingly, out-of-field teaching was not a major predictor of performance. On the other hand, characteristics of schools (such as socioeconomic status, student demographics, and proportion of students who took the Earth Science course) were statistically related to exam performance. These results suggest that it is important to support K-12 teachers in making Earth science interesting and relevant to marginalized students. The only Curriculum & Instruction paper in this issue describes a program that can provide professional development to in-service teachers while training future Earth science teachers. James Ebert and coauthors created an undergraduate research experience in which students designed, built, and evaluated physical models that could be used to teach topics that currently lack effective physical models. At the end of their experience, the students presented their work in a program for in-service teachers. The current teachers learned new ideas for the classroom, and the future teachers used engineering practices (which are part of the Next Generation Science Standards), in addition to achieving benefits similar to the ones that STEM majors gain in traditional research experiences. The other papers in this issue address education beyond the K-12 level. The World Climate simulation is an activity that can be used by groups from middle school to graduate school. Participants role-play as nations negotiating a climate agreement to try to limit warming to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, then enter their agreement into a computer model to see the climate impacts of their decisions. Margaret Hensel and coauthors interviewed 12 participants who had large gains in their sense of urgency about climate change to gain insights into the aspects of the game that led to the changes. They found that the participants’ sense of collective efficacy improved when their deliberations were productive, and suggest that presenting students with a problem that cannot be solved without teamwork made the activity successful for those students. Teamwork skills, like those needed in the World Climate simulation, are an important learning outcome for geoscience majors. However, instructors often assume that students will gain those skills simply by working in groups, without explicit instruction about the skills they are supposed to gain. Samuel Nyarko and Heather Petcovic investigated the development of teamwork by embedding a participant-observer in a hydrology field course. They observed that several skills (communication, leadership, peer-mentoring and teaching, and coordination) were frequently used by students, but