In an effort to increase the visibility of the National COSEE Network within target audiences, the National COSEE Office is working to establish an organized COSEE presence at various national science and education society conferences and meetings including:
Ocean Scientists - American Geophysical Union (AGU) and Ocean Sciences (AGU, ASLO, TOS)
Diversity (Students Underrepresented/Underserved in STEM Disciplines) - Society for Advancing Chicanos and Native Americans in Sciences (SACNAS)
Science Education - National Science Teachers Association (NSTA)
Posters and other conference presentation materials are displayed here.
With the rise of YouTube and other online outlets, short videos have become a part of the daily information stream for students, educators, and citizens. In this 2012 Ocean Sciences presentation, Catherine Cramer shares the COSEE OCEAN template: how to produce an engaging video, featuring a scientist communicating their research clearly, that will capture the attention of a broad audience in under three minutes.
Want to make salinity and its connections to the water cycle, ocean circulation and climate come alive for your students? NASA Aquarius Education and Public Outreach has teamed up with COSEE-Ocean Systems to conduct three public and four educator-focused webinars, as well as a pre-launch workshop at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The 2008 North Atlantic Bloom Experiment (NAB08) was a collaborative effort to observe an entire phytoplankton spring bloom. To broadly disseminate results and contribute to the public’s understanding of ocean science, NAB08 participants collaborated with COSEE-Ocean Systems to present a series of five webinars describing the motivations and findings of this multidisciplinary experiment.
COSEE-OS External Evaluator Dr. Ted Repa, representing four COSEE Centers (California, NOW, Ocean Systems and West), shared end-of-workshop evaluations from the Graduate Student / Faculty Collaborative workshop series conducted by these Centers in 2010 and 2011 at the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting.
The Aquarius mission is brimming with educational content that hits all four areas of STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This poster, presented at the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting, summarizes available educational products and opportunities.
Academic scientists have a number of avenues through which they can participate in education and outreach (E/O) programs to address the mandate for broader impacts. During this presentation, the authors presented one scientist’s perspective on the advantages and limitations of different modes of E/O and included specific examples from the past three years of working with COSEE-Ocean Systems.
In many educator professional development workshops, scientists present content in a slideshow-type format and field questions afterwards. Drawbacks of this approach include: inability to begin the lecture with content that is responsive to audience needs; lack of flexible access to specific material within the linear presentation; and “Q&A” sessions are not easily scalable to broader audiences. Often this type of traditional interaction provides little direct benefit to the scientists.
The Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence - Ocean Systems (COSEE-OS) applies the technique of concept mapping with demonstrated effectiveness in helping scientists and educators “get on the same page” (deCharon et al., 2009). A key aspect is scientist professional development geared towards improving face-to-face and online communication with non-scientists. COSEE-OS promotes scientist-educator collaboration, tests the application of scientist-educator maps in new contexts through webinars, and is piloting the expansion of maps as long-lived resources for the broader community.
Discover a powerful visual tool to help your students and audiences– no matter where they live - improve their understanding of ocean and climate interactions. COSEE-OS has developed a suite of interactive multimedia tools that illustrate clear connections among and within the ocean, earth, and solar systems.
Last March, Amy Holt Cline of COSEE-OS and UNH, along with Perrin Chick of the Seacoast Science Center in Rye, NH and Author/Illustrator Karen Romano Young, presented the connections between art and ocean science using COSEE-OS online tools. This presentation included background on why art and science are naturally connected and should be taught together to help create more innovative and creative thinkers.
Before the presentation, questions were sent to the National Marine Education List Serve, called Scuttlebutt, to find out what ways educators have been using art to teach marine science topics in their classrooms or work places. Over fifty responses were collected and were assembled into a concept map. The map is interactive in that a description of the text is found when the cursor rolls over each circle to learn more.
The Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE) is a national network with the collective mission to engage scientists and educators and transform ocean science education. The network is comprised of twelve centers that are either regional or thematci in focus. As a thematic center, COSEE Ocean Sytems has worked to create and develop a suite of interactive tools that can be used to enhance ocean and climate literacy by emphasizing the connections between the ocean and the Earth's climate system.
In two linked applications - The Ocean Climate Interactive (OCI) and the Concept Map Builder (CMB) - concept mapping is used as a foundation for learners to make connections between fundamental concepts in ocean and climate science. These cost-free online tools have been incrementally developed, tested, and refined through a series of teacher/scientist professional development workshops to maximize their efficacy.
COSEE West partnered with COSEE Coastal Trends to present an Ocean Observing Systems (OOS) based curricula and hands-on activities workshop to enable K-12 teachers and informal educators to use real-time or near real-time OOS data. For the past two years, COSEE West has hosted a week long OOS summer workshop for teachers and informal educators in which several scientists presented ocean science content related to their work which uses or contributes to OOS online data.
The Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence-Ocean Systems (COSEE-OS) aims to bring ocean literacy and current scientific content into both formal classrooms and informal education settings across the country. As part of a COSEE-OS grant that builds on the success of an interdisciplinary, semester-long class offered by the University of Maine, the University of New Hampshire has developed a new academic collaboration between the Departments of Education and Earth Sciences. Ongoing during spring semester 2010, the novel Exploring Informal Science Education Through Ocean Inquiry course explores the potential an ocean context offers for teaching a range of science topics. This program integrates fundamental concepts with “big picture” connections and resources in a highly flexible and engaging delivery system.
Ocean Inquiry Project (OIP), a non-profit organization in Puget Sound, WA, delivers inquiry-style marine science education using a hands-on curriculum while gathering research-quality data in Puget Sound for scientific partners. A collaboration between COSEE Ocean Learning Communities and OIP is bringing together ocean researchers, volunteers from environmental organizations, informal educators, and local youth groups for day-long field-research learning experiences on Puget Sound. These field experiences strive to give the diverse participant groups a better appreciation for the process of science, how oceanographic data is collected, and an increased understanding of the Puget Sound ecosystem and the role humans play in the ecosystem’s health
This collaboration has benefited the non-scientists and scientists alike. In this presentation, we will discuss our approach, and provide examples of the successes and challenges encountered during this collaboration.
Graduate students often enter marine sciences with disparate backgrounds and experiences. Understanding biological oceanography, because of multiple interactions among organisms and with the environment, can be daunting to new graduate students. We use concept mapping as a tool to allow students to better integrate information and turn it into knowledge by explicitly visualizing ideas.
The Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence Central Gulf of Mexico has implemented a five-day Teacher Scientist Institute in several states each year during its first and second grant periods. These Institutes are designed to be similar in format and provide abundant opportunities for scientists and teachers to work together, learn each others’ cultures, and develop a relationship for future work together.
Since 2005, COSEE-OS has been creating & testing models of collaboration, particularly with respect to reaching rural and inland audiences, engaging ocean researchers, and creating transferable activities for classroom education. In this presentation, we:
Summarize strides made by COSEE-OS in reaching rural and inland audiences.
Describe how COSEE-OS has increased the capacity of scientists to efficiently translate their research into compelling and relevant content for various audiences by helping them deconstruct knowledge into concepts for construction of concept maps.
Conduct two transferable activities, one from our recent publication "Teaching Physical Concepts in Oceanography: An Inquiry Based Approach" entitled "Effects of Temperature & Salinity on Density & Stratification" and one based on two Science Daily articles illustrating transferability between ocean science content and standard physical science and terrestrial ecological concepts.
To support the COSEE mission of engaging scientists and educators to transform ocean science education, COSEE NOW team members have been conducting an annual online scientist survey since 2004 (most recently with the aid of ASLO). This presentation by Chris Parsons, the COSEE NOW evaluator and principal of Word Craft, offers a summary of six years of results on ocean scientists’ involvement in, practices and needs related to education and outreach.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" – Chinese Proverb.
Can we teach scientists to "fish" for their audiences from all walks of life, and enjoy the experience so much that they contribute to informal education for a lifetime? Using cutting-edge multimedia tools and a novel workshop model, COSEE-OS is helping scientists better communicate with the public by working with informal science educators.
Error is a given when trying to communicate the relationships among complicated science concepts. Communication research has identified at least 11 sources of error that the scientist needs to minimize: error due to the sender, encoding, the message, the channel of communication, the receiver, decoding, the audience, the physical environment, the social environment, the political and economic environment, and/or time.
COSEE-OS has developed a professional development model for scientists and online tools to minimize these eleven sources of error (not eliminate them because that is not an achievable goal). Particular attention is paid to minimizing the encoding and decoding sources of error through the use of online concept mapping tools which graphically communicate the scientist's logic of how they think, non-linearly, about the relationships among their various concepts of interest.
The Ocean Gazing podcast is one of COSEE NOW’s primary educational outreach tools. The aim is to provide scientists with a forum for telling their stories about ocean observing science and the broader impacts that science is having on people beyond academic institutions.
In each biweekly episode, Ocean Gazing integrates interviews, ambient sounds gathered in the field and the lab, music, audio recordings from listeners (from children to adults), and the unveiling of a mystery sound. The scientists have said they enjoy participating in the podcast as a mechanism for making their science accessible and promoting the work they do in an engaging and accurate manner. We have between 300 and 400 downloads for each episode, and we are actively promoting Ocean Gazing on Facebook. We've created CDs containing the first 26 episodes and high school curriculum companion pieces for a handful of the podcasts. These are being distributed to scientists and educators.
COSEE West conducted online workshops to disseminate ocean science content to larger audiences than could be reached using in-person activities. Teachers and educators not served by a COSEE Center could be reached through distance learning.
Three different online workshop models were created. A base model had online presentations by scientists, with scientists available to answer participants’ questions online. A professor model had scientists presenting ocean science content during an undergraduate course, followed by an online workshop in which undergraduates served as mentors for ocean science content (supervised by the professor and graduate students) and teacher leaders served as pedagogy mentors to educator participants. An undergraduate field research model built upon the professor model: scientists presented ocean science content to undergraduate students during a field research course, followed by an online workshop in which undergraduates conducted field research a nd exchanged findings online with participants. Participants also had an opportunity to observe field research being conducted.
COSEE West and other COSEE Centers have conducted a variety of education outreach activities, including one day professional development workshops with scientists and educators. Although the literature indicates limited benefits of one day professional development workshops for implementation of science content in the classroom, there are other benefits to these workshops.
Ocean observing systems (OOS) provide a wealth of real-time data that can be put to use in classrooms and informal learning centers. This presents an exciting opportunity to connect students and the public to real-world science. Additionally, when students analyze real-time data in structured learning environments, it can help them improve their inquiry skills while exposing them to relevant ocean science topics to increase their level of ocean knowledge. However, building tools to help students, teachers and the public access and understand real-time data effectively presents many logistical and design challenges.
To address these challenges, a collaborative group of scientists, classroom and informal educators, education researchers, and data translators have worked together to develop several novel approaches to bring real-time OOS data to classroom and public audiences. This team was brought together by the Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence Networked Ocean World (COSEE NOW), a virtual community of scientists and educators seeking to foster collaborations that will engage participants in the development of new products that promote the Ocean Literacy essential concepts.
