Learning Progressions in Environmental Science Literacy

1. Learning Progressions in Environmental Science Literacy Charles W. (Andy) Anderson June 16, 2008

2. The Forest: Three Stories about Environmental Literacy Learning Progressions • A policy story concerning the implications of research on learning progressions for environmental science literacy on standards, assessments, and curricula. • A research story, about the iterative process of developing and validating a learning progression. • A learning story about how children can develop understanding and responsible citizenship in a complex and important domain: Processes that transform carbon, water, and biodiversity in socio-ecological systems.

3. The Policy Story Implications of Research on Learning Progressions for Standards, Assessments, and Curricula

4. Environmental Science Literacy as a Curricular Goal One measure of science literacy: The ability to understand and critically evaluate scientifically-based arguments about socio-ecological issues, such as the reports that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize: • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) • Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. • ESA position statement on biofuels

5. Question: Are these publications just for the experts, or do members of the general public need to understand them?

6. What do politicians do? • Hillary Clinton on gas tax holiday: Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to put my lot in with economists… • Tom Friedman on Egyptian regime spending: • Fuel subsidies: $11 billion/year • Education: $6 billion/year • “…the pain of removing the subsidies would be politically suicidal.”

7. Conclusions • People, and politicians, will ignore what the experts say if the message is painful and they don’t understand it. • This is a problem for science education

8. Processes in Socio-ecological Systems (Loop Diagram: Figure 1 on Handout)

9. The Research Story Iterative Development and Validation of Learning Progressions

10. Learning Progression Framework(Handout Table 1)

11. Parts of Framework • Progress Variables (columns of the table): Aspects of knowledge and practice that are present in some form at all Levels of Achievement, so that their development can be traced across Levels. • Levels of Achievement (rows of the table): Patterns in learners’ knowledge and practice that extend across Progress Variables. • Learning Performances (cells of the table): specific practices characteristic of students who are at a particular Level of Achievement and reasoning about a particular Progress Variable.

12. Criteria for Validation • Conceptual coherence: a learning progression should “make sense,” in that it tells a comprehensible and reasonable story of how initially naïve students can develop mastery in a domain. • Compatibility with current research: a learning progression should build on findings or frameworks of the best current research about student learning. • Empirical validation: The assertions we make about student learning should be grounded in empirical data about real students.

13. Applying the Criteria to Specific Parts of the Framework (Handout Table 2)

14. Development and Validation: An Iterative Process • Develop initial framework • Develop assessments (e.g. written tests, interviews) and/or teaching experiments based on the framework • Use data from assessments and teaching experiments to revise framework • Develop new assessments….

15. The Learning Story Levels of Achievement and Trends

16. What Kind of Achievement? Practices of Environmental Science Literate Citizens • Inquiry: developing accounts by learning from experience • Accounts: using scientific knowledge to explain and predict • Citizenship: making environmentally responsible decisions based on accounts • Private roles: learner, consumer, worker • Public roles: voter, volunteer, advocate

17. Strands: Types of Accounts • Carbon: Processes that generate, transform, and oxidize organic carbon in socio-ecological systems • Water: Processes that move and transform water, and substances in water in socio-ecological systems • Biodiversity: Processes that affect survival, growth, reproduction, and selection of organisms in socio-ecological systems

18. Progress Variables:Connected Accounts within Strands • Types of accounts: connected processes • e.g., processes that generate, transform, and oxidize organic carbon • Types of accounts:connected scales • Cellular/atomic-molecular • Organismal/macroscopic • Large-scale in space and time • Elements of accounts • e.g., life, matter, cause/energy, models

19. What makes things happen? • Carbon: plant and animal growth, animal movement, decay, combustion • Water: rain and snow, water soaking into the ground, springs, wells, lakes and streams, water pollution and purification • Biodiversity: organisms living their life cycles, evolution, succession

20. Informal Explanations:Power Prevails • Force-dynamic causation: Things happen because of the interplay of “forces” • “Natural tendencies” of organisms (plants, animals), materials (water), or other agents (flames) • Enablers that help agents to express their natural tendencies (e.g., food, air, water, warm conditions • Antagonists that work against expression of natural tendencies • Strongest force wins!

21. Informal Explanations of Events • Carbon: Food goes to your stomach, then it helps you to grow (food enables your natural tendency to grow) • Water: water is “soaked up” by the ground (natural tendencies of water to run downhill and ground to soak it up) • Biodiversity: dogs adapt to living with humans (natural tendency of animals to adapt)

22. Scientific Explanations: Hierarchy of Systems and the Rule of Law • Hierarchy of systems at different scales. From macroscopic, visible processes and systems to: • Explanations of mechanisms based on hidden subsystems and • Explanations of contexts that connect accounts in space and time. • Principles or laws that always apply in their domains. From strongest force wins to all parts of the system are constrained by principles: • Conservation of matter (mass and atoms) • Conservation of energy • Fixed genetic resources for every organism

23. Scientific Explanations of Events • Carbon: Large food molecules (polymers) are broken down into monomers (digestion), carried by your blood to cells that make them into new polymers (biosynthesis) (tracing matter) • Water: Water and dissolved/suspended substances enter groundwater. Suspended substances are filtered out, but not dissolved substances (tracing water and materials in water) • Biodiversity: humans breed dogs selectively. Dogs with genetic traits we like survive and reproduce; other dogs die without reproducing (gene expression and selection--life or death--rather than individuals adapting)

24. Levels of Achievement:Upper Elementary through High School • Level 4: Successful principled, model-based reasoning about processes in socio-ecological systems (high school standards). • Level 3: “School science” narratives of processes in systems (middle school standards). • Level 2: Events driven by hidden mechanisms (elementary standards). • Level 1: Macroscopic accounts based on force-dynamic causation (natural tendencies with enablers or antagonists) and linked by informal cultural models

25. Table 4: Contrasting Ways of Grouping and Explaining Carbon-transforming Processes Black: Processes that students at all Levels have accounts for Red: Level 2 accounts based on informal cultural models Green: Level 5 accounts based on scientific models

26. Trends from Younger to Older Students for Types of Carbon Accounts • Types of accounts: connected processes. From connections by informal cultural models to tracing matter and energy. • Types of accounts:connected scales. From macroscopic, visible processes and systems to: • Explanations of mechanisms based on hidden subsystems and • Explanations of contexts that connect accounts in space and time.

27. Trends from Younger to Older Students for Elements of Carbon Accounts • Life: from vitalistic accounts (living and non-living things have different natural tendencies) to tracing matter and energy through chemical processes in living systems • Matter: from matter as enabler of processes (e.g., food for growth, fuel for flames) to tracing matter (substances with chemical identities) through processes • Cause/energy: from force-dynamic accounts (natural tendencies with enablers and antagonists) to transformations and degradation of energy • Models • Metaphors: From informal personal connections to formal mechanisms • Principles: Developing “sense of necessity” that processes are constrained by principles • Representations: Developing mastery of codified scientific representations

28. Matter: CO2, H2O, and minerals Matter: Organic matter & O2 Energy: Sunlight Photosynthesis Biosynthesis, digestion, food webs, fossil fuel formation Energy: Chemicalpotential energy Movement of CO2, H2O, and minerals Combustion, cellular respiration Energy: Work& heat Level 5 Reasoning about the Carbon Cycle

29. The oxygen-carbondioxide cycle Sunlight Plants Plants Carbon dioxide Oxygen Nutrients Food chains Animals Decay Energy sources for plants: sunlight, nutrients, water Energy sources for animals: food, water Decomposers don’t need energy Level 3 Reasoning about the Carbon Cycle

30. Water Accounts • Types of processes: movement of water, substances in water • Level 1 accounts: surface water running downhill, underground ponds; “pollution” as quality of water rather than materials in water (Valerie on well location) • Level 4 accounts: flow of water (visible and invisible) through watersheds; other materials going in and out of solution and suspension

31. Biodiversity Accounts • Types of processes: Individual life cycles in niche and habitat, evolution, succession • Level 1 accounts: Individuals adapt to environment, undifferentiated landscapes • Level 4 accounts: • Individuals live or die with fixed genetic resources • Evolution as change in populations caused by reproduction and selection • Succession as change in ecosystems caused by “selection” of populations

32. Next Steps • Sessions in this workshop • Env lit session, looking at your students’ tests • Other sessions: are you discussing any of these processes? • REESE proposal: Continue carbon strand with better teaching materials and experiments • MSP proposal: Continue all 3 strands with 3 other LTER’s • GLBRC: What do students need to know about biofuels? • John Greenler, Jonathon Schramm

33. Thank You Major Contributors Lindsey Mohan, Hui Jin, Kristin Gunckel, Beth Covitt, Edna Tan, Blakely Tsurusaki, Jing Chen, Hasan Abdel-Kareem, Rebecca Dudek, Josephine Zesaguli, Hsin-Yuan Chen, Brook Wilke, Laurel Hartley, Hamin Baek, Kennedy Onyancha, Chris Wilson, Ed Smith, and Jim Gallagher at Michigan State University Mark Wilson, Karen Draney, Jinnie Choi, and Yong-Sang Lee at the University of California, Berkeley. This research is supported in part by three grants from the National Science Foundation: Developing a Research-based Learning Progression for the Role of Carbon in Environmental Systems (REC 0529636), the Center for Curriculum Materials in Science (ESI-0227557) and Long-term Ecological Research in Row-crop Agriculture (DEB 0423627. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Website: http://edr1.educ.msu.edu/EnvironmentalLit/index.htm