I'm Not a Scientist

Image courtesy of: Wikipedia

Recently a group of national-level politicians has recklessly embraced a “I’m not a scientist” mantra in order to avoid any meaningful dialogue about global climate change, its impacts, and steps we should be taking to mitigate its effects. Hiding behind a shield of “I’m not a scientist” is cowardly, incurious, and irresponsible.

Dear "Leaders" — We’ve entrusted you to represent the best interests of "We the People" in a mature and honorable manner. Your ignorance (real or feigned) should not be an excuse for inaction on global climate change (or any other issue you may find distasteful to your privileged status). Avoiding the consensus of thousands of scientific experts and the overwhelming abundance of climate data collected from around the world is criminally negligent and morally bankrupt.

Sadly, we elected you, so a portion of the blame lies with us. We deserve better, but it appears we’re willing to settle for mediocre charlatans who force us to fiddle while the planet burns.

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“At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.” — Maurice Maeterlinck, Author

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” —Daniel Patrick Moynihan, US Senator

“If you’re scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you, and that understanding empowers you.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist

Why Science?

Having endured (survived?) two weeks of state testing—with an additional week yet to go—I feel starved for nourishing, hopeful science.

For 15 years now, I've seen firsthand the damage wrought by standardized testing. These tests stifle creativity, curiosity, and the human desire to understand and discover—in both students and teachers. Learning is reduced to its lowest forms: to the memorization and regurgitation of bland facts; to mindless reading and writing and bubbling with wooden, graphite-based, number 2 pencils; to the measurement of socioeconomic wealth and privilege disguised as "assessment." Is it any wonder that our educational system continues to suffer under this "Race to the Top" where "No Child's Left Behind"?

So then... Why does science matter: to me, to our students, to our economy, to our society, to our planet? Where is the purpose and hope for science in our schools and in our lives?

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once again eloquently explains why science and science literacy matter in both a democratic society and our human quest to understand the universe:

Writing in Science Class

A question posted recently on the National Science Teachers Association blog caught my attention:

We’re having a discussion in our secondary school science department. Some of us think our lessons should incorporate more opportunities for students to learn how to write, while others maintain there’s little time for writing and that’s the job of the English teachers. Who is correct?

I felt compelled to respond:

Communication in all forms is fundamental to science; therefore, writing should be a regular part of the science classroom. Teaching the writing process should not be the exclusive domain of just one teacher or department, but should be shared as part of school, grade level, and/or department goals and curricular expectations. Arbitrarily injecting writing exercises into the science classroom is neither the most efficient nor most effective approach to the task—common language among teachers and students as well as common writing strategies are needed to help maximize student progress in writing. 

Image courtesy of morgueFile

Including the process of writing into the science curriculum takes time, effort, resources, and collaboration—it’s tough to go it alone. It takes a shared vision and commitment to help students become better writers in all disciplines. 

While it may be (and is) daunting to add “one more thing” to the science classroom, better writers ultimately enhance all learning. Start small—incorporate one simple, manageable, and authentic strategy into your existing science repertoire, such as writing descriptive titles or writing scientific questions—then slowly build from there. The key to success is modeling and practicing the process until it becomes routine and comfortable to you and your students. 

As a science teacher, I shared the exact same questions and concerns as you when we first started emphasizing writing at our school many years ago. Now, writing (as well as reading, math, and other shared practices) is a regular and natural part of our everyday science experience, which is a source of pride and achievement for our students, our teachers, and our school.

Beware Charlatan Science

“Science literacy is vaccine against charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance of the forces of nature.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist

Image credit: Microsoft Clipart

Conscientious scientists do not cherry-pick data to fit their conclusions (that's bias), but allow data and evidence to inform, educate, and guide their research—no matter the unexpected results. Science is challenging and complex; yet we must be cautious of charlatans who seek to infect us with pseudoscience and denialism:

• Beware of charlatan "scientists" who cherry-pick data and selectively name-drop. Unfortunately, many members of US Congress fit into this category, especially those who subscribe to climate change denialism.
• Beware of charlatan "scientists" who do not understand what "uncertainty" means in science. Scientists must always consider, respect, and address the physical and statistical uncertainties in their data, measurements, and models, and they must express their results in terms of mathematical confidence.
• Beware of charlatan "scientists" who misuse the term "theory" (as in, "it's just a theory"). A scientific theory is a well-reasoned explanation based on mountains of evidence—it is not just a guess. An educated guess in science is called a hypothesis, which must be tested for validity before its veracity can be established.
• Beware of "news" organizations that claim to tell "both sides of the story" equitably. One dissenting opinion does not negate thousands of peer-reviewed, published research papers. One loud-mouthed argument does not constitute a fair balance.
• Beware of charlatan "scientists" who short-circuit the quality assurance and rigor built into the peer-review process. Scientists themselves are their own worst critics and very effectively weed out questionable science.

In an age of charlatanism, it is important that science education remain vigilant and true to how science really works. A good science curriculum teaches students about the nature of science and fully engages students in the complexities of scientific thinking, knowing, and doing. For more about How Science Works, visit Understanding Science, an amazing website developed by the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

Pursuit of Light

"NASA tells stories about big things: big places, big data, big ideas." The Pursuit of Light reminds us why scientific literacy is vital to our future.

Who are we, and what is our place in the universe? These are the really big questions that scientists ask. NASA is one of many science organizations that pursue answers to these fundamental questions. But the pursuit of light, and knowledge, and curiosity, and wonder, and excitement begins much earlier — in our classrooms. Passionate educators, passionate students, and passionate learning today create and nurture the literate citizens of tomorrow.

NASA Canceled the Space Program, Right?

NASA: The Blue Marble

Since the end of the shuttle program, my students have repeatedly expressed the notion that space exploration is done: "NASA canceled the space program, right?" While I know that's untrue, they do not — and that is very troubling (and eminently frustrating!).

In my classroom, I constantly use supplementary resources from NASA and other US government science organizations to help students understand that we are actively studying the Earth system, the solar system, and beyond every day. Earth science is not a collection of static facts and information, but is a dynamic and ever-evolving field of cutting-edge research. As educators, we need to help students make connections between what they are learning in the classroom and what is happening in the real world—it is not OK to just teach Earth science from a textbook. Like other scientists, NASA scientists are active explorers who continue to expand our knowledge of our own planet and beyond. The good news for us is that we can access a myriad of NASA resources right in the classroom and participate in the exploration:

• NASA's main website is the logical starting point for the latest news and information about Earth and space. In addition to general information, the site has sections specifically for educators and for students with links to lessons, images, videos, podcasts, simulations, grants, scholarships, and more. We (often) complain about government, but NASA's website has got to be one of the best damn uses of taxpayer money out there.
• NASA also has a huge variety of resources for iDevices at the NASA App Store. There are apps for exploring planets, finding out about the latest space missions, checking launch dates, and more. Oh, and all the apps are free. The NASA App HD for iPad is simply stunning.
• Want the latest on climate? NASA's Global Climate Change provides real-time vital signs of our planet. My favorite parts of this site are the links to evidence, causes, effects, and uncertainties. Not only do you have the latest climate data at your fingertips, but the process of climate science itself is eloquently and transparently deconstructed and explained.
• Need current events about planet Earth? NASA's Earth Observatory has fantastic articles, images of the day, global maps, and in-depth features about our home planet. Their weekly email digest is a must-have resource. Go subscribe today!
• Need even more up-to-the-minute information? NASA has a fleet of Twitter accounts that provide the latest news from space explorers around the globe and beyond, including live tweets from robotic pioneers in space. A few of my favorites include NASAVoyager and NASAVoyager2, NASAJuno, and NewHorizons2015.

There are tons more NASA resources out there for students, educators, and the curious alike. We need not lament the demise of the space program; it is alive and well, even during these challenging socio-economic times. However, to keep the reality and promise of Earth and space exploration alive and thriving, we need to give our students every opportunity to learn about it and participate in it.

If there is any question about the urgency of science literacy in the 21st century, Stephen Colbert and Neil deGrasse Tyson spend an hour-and-a-half discussing the importance of science and technology in this thoroughly enjoyable video.

Global Climate Change Article Analysis

Image credit: IAN Symbol Libraries

To finish our annual study of global climate change, I ask students to survey a variety of scientific literature outlining the impacts of climate change around the world and to interpret their findings. Students need the opportunity to engage with the scientific literature around global climate change in order to develop their own sense of climate science literacy. The US Global Change Research Program sums up the importance of climate literacy in the following guide, Climate Literacy—The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences:

"Climate Science Literacy is an understanding of your influence on climate and climate’s influence on you and society. A climate-literate person:

• understands the essential principles of Earth’s climate system,
• knows how to assess scientifically credible information about climate,
• communicates about climate and climate change in a meaningful way, and
• is able to make informed and responsible decisions with regard to actions that may affect climate."

I provide students with a wide sampling of scientific articles that document climate change and climate change impacts from around the world. Each student selects, reads, and summarizes the main scientific ideas from several of these articles, then chooses one article to interpret in more detail. In the final analysis, students create a labeled diagram that illustrates the main scientific ideas from their chosen article and explains the connection between the science and the climate change impacts.

For most students, this is the first time they have engaged in a formal literature review of scientific material, thus time and support is provided to help students dissect these articles efficiently. At our school we use a Mark-It-Up reading strategy, which helps students break down complex texts into the comprehensible essentials. Students write their "mark-it-up" notes on stickies and place these stickies around the room next to their article's placard. All students visit and review the stickies created by other students before drafting their final analysis.

For the articles themselves, I keep my eyes open for timely and relevant stories from reputable and fairly unbiased science sources such as BBC Science, National Geographic, NPR, NOAA, NASA, etc. The articles are usually no more than two pages in length, span a range of teenage reading levels, are scientifically-based with data and evidence, and encompass a wide range of climate impacts around the planet. A few of these articles are provided in the links at the end of this post.

As mentioned in my previous post, my greatest hope is that my students develop an appreciation for science so that they can make logical and informed decisions based on data and evidence, not hype and hot air.

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A Sampling of Climate Change Articles:

• BBC, Alien Invaders: The Next Generation
• Boston Globe, Scientists Say Climate Change Could Make Coffee and Chocolate Endangered Foods
• NOAA, Life of an Air Flask
• NOAA News, NOAA Greenhouse Gas Index Continues Climbing
• NPR, Climate Change Presents a Burr for Coffee Growers
• NYTimes, Carbon Detectives Are Tracking Gases in Colorado

In Defense of Hands-On Science

Investigating Rates of Heating and Cooling

"The debate over how best to teach science has amplified as school districts and states place more emphasis on standardized testing." —David Klahr, professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh

In a Palm Beach Post article, middle school science teachers in a Florida school have discarded hands-on science learning activities in favor of demonstrations, videos, PowerPoint lectures, and other direct instruction techniques. Their argument is that lengthy, hands-on science investigations do not translate into significantly positive gains on state standardized tests. As a scientist and educator, I am disturbed and unsettled by this decision to sacrifice a vital component of the process of science in the name of test scores.

Two years ago, our school district adopted a curriculum that promotes inquiry-based learning as an essential component of our students' science education. This inquiry focus is derived from the National Science Education Standards:

Scientific inquiry refers to the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose explanations based on the evidence derived from their work. Inquiry also refers to the activities of students in which they develop knowledge and understanding of scientific ideas, as well as an understanding of how scientists study the natural world. [National Research Council. 1996. National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.]

In addition to an inquiry focus, our curriculum strives to teach for enduring understanding, whereby students make mindful meaning of their learning as well as transfer their learning to new situations or problems; simple knowledge acquisition is insufficient. To achieve this worthy goal, which ultimately benefits students and society, requires a commitment to creating an environment where the process of science is paramount, where our students are engaged in authentic, hands-on learning.

In my opinion, taking away hands-on learning opportunities denies students access to a rich, quality scientific education experience. It prioritizes extrinsically-driven, short-term knowledge acquisition and test score gains over intrinsically-motivated, deep understanding and lifelong learning. I choose depth of understanding over breadth of knowledge—a depth developed through student engagement in well-designed, meaningful, time-worthy (not time-wasting), hands-on laboratory investigations.

The debate on how best to teach science will continue, but I hope that a rational commitment to authentic, inquiry-based science education—which includes hands-on investigations—survives the pressures of high stakes testing.

Analyzing Local Weather Data

These days, there are numerous sources and tools on the internet that provide access to live weather data, which can be used to practice and refine data interpretation skills. In our school district, data interpretation is one of the essential middle level science learnings:

"Students can interpret, analyze, and evaluate data and recognize bias in order to formulate logical conclusions."

ASOS: the National Weather Service's
automated weather observing network

The National Weather Service provides a plethora of weather data that is ideal for use in the classroom. In my last post, I talked about hurricane data. In this post, I'd like to explore local weather data.

On a daily, monthly, and yearly basis, the National Weather Service records and archives basic weather data such as temperature, pressure, wind, precipitation, etc. In most places across the United States, there is more than 100 years worth of data in the climate archives—all of this data is accessible online. This data can be used in the classroom to analyze local patterns and trends.

To access the National Weather Service climate data:

1. Go to http://www.weather.gov
2. Type your zip code into the Local Forecast box in the top left corner
3. On the next page, select the link to your local National Weather Service office in the top left corner—it looks like "NWS Denver-Boulder CO"
4. On the next page, look for the Climate section along the left panel and select the Local link. 

From here, you and your students have access to all of the local climate data and records. One of the reports I use with my students is the "Climatological Summary Month-to-Date," which provides a table of the current month's daily weather statistics. Each day during one month, we start our science class by pulling up this page and recording the previous day's high temperature, low temperature, and precipitation in our own data tables. At the end of the month, we graph, summarize, and analyze the data. Students reflect on the following questions:

• What was the average high temperature for the month?
• What was the average low temperature for the month?
• What was the total precipitation for the month?
• How much warmer or colder than normal was this month?
• How much wetter or drier than normal was this month?
• Based on the data, how would you summarize this month's weather?
• Were there any notable or unusual weather events this month?
• Were there any record weather events this month?

We should seek every opportunity to bring authentic data into the classroom to promote scientific literacy and help students make real world connections. One of my favorite quotes that bears repeating (often):

"If you're scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you, and that understanding empowers you..." —Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist

The National Weather Service is but one of the many science organizations that publishes useful data online. I will discuss others in future posts...

Understanding Science

A few years back, each teacher at my school was asked to create an artistic puzzle piece that visually reflected her or his values and beliefs. The dozens of linked puzzle pieces are still on display in our school lobby and make an impressive statement about our staff. Number one on my puzzle piece is "scientific literacy and integrity."

With all of the attacks on the scientific community from various "denier" groups, I worry about the state of scientific literacy in the United States. I fear that too many people are scientifically illiterate and that their illiteracy is being leveraged against them. I want my students to be scientifically literate so that they can make intelligent, informed choices in their lives and not be misled by faulty evidence or illogic.

Understanding Science is an excellent, comprehensive resource for learning about and promoting scientific literacy. Produced by the UC Museum of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley, Its mission "is to provide a fun, accessible, and free resource that accurately communicates what science is and how it really works." With a variety of tools, resources, and lessons that span the K through 16 classroom, Understanding Science showcases the process of science.

I'd like to highlight two of my favorite resources from Understanding Science:

How Science Works flowchart from Understanding Science

1. The How Science Works flowchart is an interactive, graphical representation of the process of science and scientific inquiry. I provide a copy of this flowchart to each of my students and use it to frame all of our discussions and activities. Students begin to understand more deeply that science does not happen in a vacuum, that it follows a logical, iterative process, and that it is an ongoing and ever-changing endeavor.
2. Asteroids and Dinosaurs is a lesson that nicely illustrates "how science works." Tracing the story of Luis and Walter Alvarez, Asteroids and Dinosaurs tell the incredible tale of the work involved in developing the link between asteroid impact and dinosaur extinction. It makes for a great beginning-of-year lesson on the nature of science that can be referenced time and again throughout the school year. 

As a scientist and a science teacher, I feel it is imperative that we teach students how to be scientifically literate. While I don't expect all of my students to become scientists, I want them to enter the "real world" empowered with the critical thinking skills that are valued in science—many of which I see lacking in today's adults.

A favorite quote of mine from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sums it up well: "If you're scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you, and that understanding empowers you."

Science Education Frameworks

A big day for science literacy today as the National Research Council's Framework for K-12 Science Education was released for public consumption. A hefty 283-page document, the framework outlines a grand vision for contemporary science education and "represents the first step in a process to create new standards in K-12 science education."

The framework is organized around three main dimensions of science education:

• Scientific and engineering practices;
• Crosscutting concepts that unify the study of science and engineering through their common application across fields; and
• Core ideas in four disciplinary areas: physical sciences; life sciences; earth and space sciences; and engineering, technology, and the applications of science.

While I've only just begun to absorb this massive text, I am really impressed by its scope, thoughtfulness, and organization. I hope the framework will become a primary source document for states and school districts as they create/revise their own science standards.

In browsing the earth science section of the document, the authors referenced a few sources that I think are worthy of further study as well:

• Earth Science Literacy Principles
• Ocean Literacy Principles
• Atmospheric Science Literacy Principles
• Climate Literacy Principles

To me, these documents represent some of the finest efforts to define what science literacy means. Our collective challenge is to create pathways for teachers and students to realize the grand vision of authentic, meaningful science education that has been put forth in these documents.

I'm looking forward to working with my colleagues to weave this new framework into our science education system. You can explore the framework yourself using the widget below: