Robert M. Ross

Developing and Applying a Set of Earth Science Literacy Principles

ABSTRACT The 21st century will be defined by challenges such as understanding and preparing for climate change and ensuring the availability of resources such as water and energy, which are issues deeply rooted in Earth science. Understanding Earth science concepts is critical for humanity to successfully respond to these challenges and thrive in the decades to come. As part of efforts to address this, a new program called the Earth Science Literacy Initiative (ESLI) was formed in 2008 with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Its task was to create a succinct document outlining what citizens should know about Earth science. This document, called the Earth Science Literacy Principles (ESLPs), has applications in both public and private arenas. For example, the ESLPs have been used to define the core ideas of both a middle school textbook program and a new set of K–12 science education standards. The ESLPs, which are founded in a broad representation of the geoscience community, based upon current research, and endorsed by major government, industry, and academic geoscience organizations, represent an effort by the Earth science community to create a coherent and fundamental set of big ideas and supporting concepts that represent our fields.

DEVELOPING EFFECTIVE K-16 GEOSCIENCE RESEARCH PARTNERSHIPS

CONSENSUS STATEMENT Research partnerships between scientists and K-16 students, teachers, and the general public can increase our collective understanding of the Earth system while making the science by which we understand the Earth accessible to all. Partnerships promoting authentic research integrate inquiry-based educational approaches with innovative research questions. Such partnerships serve as effective vehicles for teaching scientific logic, processes, and content, while allowing students to participate fully in scientific investigations. Benefits to the scientists include data collection and analysis that may be difficult to gather with limited human resources, and an opportunity to engage the next generation of scientists. Benefits to the students and teachers include a learning process that fosters creativity, sets high standards, teaches problem solving, and is highly motivating. When closely aligned with the National Science Education Standards, research partnerships should be an integral component of science education reform at all levels. This potential will be achieved only if partnerships are effectively evaluated from both pedagogical and scientific perspectives, and best practices are widely disseminated and supported by both scientific and educational communities. This statement has been reviewed and agreed upon by all contributors to this issue.

The Mastodon Matrix Project: An Experiment with Large-Scale Public Collaboration in Paleontological Research

An important long-term goal of science education reform is to involve more students in open-ended inquiry and authentic research. In making such “research partnerships” between scientists and students commonplace, it is critical to determine how to attract willing participation of a large number and variety of classrooms while achieving genuine scientific goals. Since early 2000, the Paleontological Research Institution and Cornell University have been administering a research partnership involving non-specialists in collecting and sorting fossils from sediments collected around recently excavated mastodon skeletons. This research partnership quickly drew a diversity of participants from across the country. Feedback on participation in this project has been extremely positive, and student discovery has yielded a large reference collection of small fossils that otherwise may not have been recovered. Based on feedback in surveys and letters, oral discussion, and other observations, we surmise that this project is popular because of the mystique of large vertebrates and because of the knowledge that this project is “authentic.” Ability for non-specialists to participate is enhanced because the activity is simple to undertake, requires little equipment, is intellectually straightforward, and is open-ended enough to readily adapt to other curricular goals.

Using Inquiry and Tenets of Multicultural Education to Engage Latino English-Language Learning Students in Learning About Geology and the Nature of Science

ABSTRACT Traditional school science instruction has been largely unsuccessful in reaching diverse student groups and students from, in particular, underrepresented backgrounds. This paper presents a case study of an urban, dual-language middle school classroom in which the teacher used an alternative instructional approach, involving her students in an authentic geological investigation with fossils. In this instructional setting, the teacher successfully engaged her English-language learning students from Latino backgrounds in science learning through inquiry, instructionally congruent science teaching strategies, and explicit instruction in nature of science. Students participating in the geological investigation interacted with practicing scientists. This instructional approach modeled the activities of science and better connected diverse students to the scientific community of practice. The practices used in this classroom provide a compelling example of how science instruction can be carried out in a way that makes science accessible despite linguistic differences and engages students in the activities of science, who otherwise might not be.

Assessing Data Accuracy When Involving Students in Authentic Paleontological Research.

Student-scientist partnerships (SSPs) can be beneficial collaborations for both students and researchers. Students learn scientific processes through direct involvement in research, while scientists gain access to data otherwise unobtainable due to the human resources necessary for its collection or analysis. Students are highly motivated to participate in SSPs by the knowledge that they are collaborators in authentic research. Thus, failure to use student data, resulting from concerns about the accuracy of student observations, may undermine student science experiences. A lack of confidence in student data may also make it difficult to leverage scientific support for, and interest in, these types of partnerships. The Paleontological Research Institution is developing and pilot testing an SSP that involves 4th–9th grade students in paleontological research on Devonian marine fossil assemblages. Formative data assessment shows that, despite numerous misidentifications, rank order of fossil taxonomic abundance may be documented by students. Correlation tests between student abundance data and data generated by project scientists are statistically significant for most comparisons. Assessments of data quality allow project staff to tailor research questions and classroom materials to better fit the educational needs and abilities of students while contributing data of sufficient accuracy to partnering scientists.

The Posture of Tyrannosaurus rex: Why Do Student Views Lag Behind the Science?

ABSTRACT Todays students were born well after the dramatic scientific reinterpretations of theropod dinosaur stance and metabolism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, if asked to draw a picture of Tyrannosaurus rex, most of these students will likely draw an animal with an upright, tail-dragging posture, remarkably like the original 1905 description of this famous dinosaur. We documented this phenomenon by asking college (n = 111) and elementary to middle school students (n = 143) to draw pictures of T. rex . On each drawing, we measured the angle of the spine from a horizontal surface. An average angle of 50–60° was found in drawings from all ages, which is within about 5° of the 1905 posture at 57°. This is in striking contrast to images created by modern dinosaur scientists, which average between 0 and 10°. In an effort to explain this pattern, we measured T. rex images in a wide variety of popular books, most of them for children, published from the 1940s to today. Since 1970, a gradually increasing proportion has represented T. rex with a more horizontal back (lower tail angle). Thus, popular books, while slow to change, cannot entirely account for this pattern. The erect T. rex stance continues, however, to dominate other areas of popular experience, such as toys and cartoons, which most American children encounter early in life. We hypothesize that older-style images long embedded in pop culture could lead to cultural inertia, in which outdated scientific ideas are maintained in the public consciousness long after scientists have abandoned them.

An Art Exhibit on Dinosaurs and the Nature of Science

The art of restoration is a key part of the science of paleontology because we are not able to observe the animals we study alive. Paleontological restorations are a complex combination of art and science – of inference from empirical observations, comparison to modern forms, and creative interpretation. Art is not a mere servant of scientists, passively illustrating their ideas. Paleontological art may lead as well as follow and may have an enormous effect on which ideas are widely favored by scientists and which are well known to the general public. It can also reveal much about how the scientific process works. Dinosaurs in particular have generated a huge volume of art in a variety of media, offering an opportunity to examine this relationship. A temporary exhibit at the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) in Ithaca, New York in early 1999 explored the connections between paleontological art and science, focusing especially on dinosaur paintings, sculptures, and toys.

Evolutionary remnants as widely accessible evidence for evolution: the structure of the argument for application to evolution education

Evolution education, in both schools and informal education, often focuses on natural selection and the fit of organisms through natural selection to their environment and way of life. Examples of evidence that evolution has occurred are therefore often limited to a modest number of classic but exotic cases, with little attention to how one might apply principles to more familiar organisms. Many of these classic examples are examples of adaptation; adaptation to local environments is, however, an outcome that could in principle also be explained by supernatural creation or design. A frequent result is the perception among the public is that examples of evolution are rare, and that the existence of well-adapted organisms may just as easily be explained metaphysically. We argue that among categories of evidence of evolution accessible to non-specialists in any environment, the most compelling evidence of common ancestry consists of remnants of evolutionary history evident in homologous features, particularly when those homologies are related to lack of fit of organisms to their way of life (“vestiges”) or to better fit that involves complicated combinations of parts usually assigned other functions (“contrivances”). Darwin emphasized the critical nature of this argument from imperfections, and it has been part of traditional catalogs of “evidence for evolution” for more than a century. Yet while remnants of history are widely used as a category of evidence for evolution, their utility in education of comparative anatomy to document body parts passed on through descent is underemphasized in evolution education at all levels. We explore the use of evolutionary remnants to document common ancestry and evidence for evolution, for application to evolution education.

Causes of evolution : a paleontological perspective

By studying evolution across geological time, paleontologists gain a perspective that sometimes complements and sometimes conflicts with views based solely on studies of extant species. The contributors to Causes of Evolution consider whether factors exerting major influences on evolution are biotic or abiotic, intrinsic or extrinsic. Causes of Evolution presents a broad sampling of paleontological research programs encompassing vertebrates, invertebrates, and vascular plants; empirical work and theoretical models; organisms ranging in age from Cambrian to Recent; and temporal scales from ecological time to hundreds of millions of years. The diverse array of research styles and opinions presented will acquaint scientists in related fields with the strengths and weaknesses of paleontology as an approach to evolutionary studies and will give evolutionary biologists of every stripe new bases for evaluating the scope and bias of their own work.