William Slattery

Supporting the Standards: A Master's Degree Program for K-12 Teacher Professional Development.

The Master of Science in Teaching (Earth Science) graduate program has been housed in the Department of Geological Sciences since 1975. In recent years the program has undergone a renaissance due to several factors. Among these are the development of an Ohio State Department of Education science model tracking the national science education standards in content and inquiry, and the development of a series of competency tests given to all Ohio K-12 students at several grade levels that include a significant number of Earth/Space science questions. Collaboration between faculty in the Colleges of Science and Mathematics and Education and Human Services has resulted in the redesign of existing courses and the development of new courses that are aligned with the national science education standards for content, inquiry, and professional development of K-12 teachers. Restructuring of the program also included the development of on-line courses, evening hours for on campus course offerings, and summer field-based courses. K-12 educator participation in this Masters level professional development program has positively impacted departmental graduate enrollment figures, increased their understandings of science and technology, and enhanced the teaching of all sciences in their classrooms.

Using the Internet in Earth Systems Courses

The Internet has become both a boon to teachers and parents and a source of serious concerns and problems. Both advantages and disadvantages are well known and publicized. However, those relating to teaching may not be, and the advantages in using the Internet for Global Science Literacy curricula especially need to be explored in some depth. In this chapter, we describe just a few of the uses of the Internet and suggest just a few of the problems. We believe that it is an essential learning environment for both teachers and students, especially for systems science based curricula. To aid in our discussion we have organized the uses according to the seven Earth Systems Education understandings (Figure 1, Chapter One).

A Gateway Website that Provides Earth-System-Science Internet Activities to K-12 Teachers

Wright State Universitys Department of Geological Sciences has developed a K-12 outreach website that links over one hundred and fifty exemplary earth- and space-science learning and dataresource sites through activity pages on one URL (http://geology.wright.edu//geology/kl2/K-12.html). The site was developed to meet the needs of classroom teachers in Ohio and elsewhere for standards-based, interactive, interdisciplinary earth- and space-science activities. Many activities designed for use at the middle-school and junior-high levels use near real-time data. Each hyperlinked site is tied to the K-12 outreach website through an activity page that provides implementation suggestions to the classroom teacher and correlates each activity with the appropriate national science-education standards and the learning outcomes of the science section of the Ohio Proficiency Test. Demonstrating proficiency in science processes and applications has recently been mandated by the Ohio legislature as a requirement for hig...