Download a poster on the Waves and Tsunamis Project, a collaboration between a marine seismologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and middle school teachers in Plymouth Massachusetts.
In Fairhaven public schools, the Ocean Sciences Education Institute (OSEI) team developed curriculum to introduce the carbon cycle to the 6th, 7th and 8th grades. By bringing cutting edge research into the middle school classroom, OSEI introduced students to the carbon cycle, its relationship to human activities, and its importance globally. Download the carbon cycle diagram here.
During this lesson, students will think about how the features of a scallop shell that are easily measured can be used to determine things about the live scallop that are difficult to measure. During the lab, students will collect data about each shell, including height, width, number of rings and any physical abnormalities. This information will allow the students to predict the area and age of the scallop. The area measurement will then be used to predict the weight of the meat (what we eat) of the scallop.
As part of her involvement in COSEE New England’s Ocean Sciences Education Institute II project, Dr. Juanita Urban-Rich researched and produced a hand-drawn poster identifying common species of marine plankton.
This report gives an overview of the progress to to promote ocean literacy in classrooms. It highlights previous ocean literacy projects and shows how they have merged to provide a community vision for ocean literacy.
The second Geoscience Education Working Group's report that includes a discussion of the overall status of the of the geoscience education and diversity community, recommendations for how the community can best promote improvements in geoscience education, and a set of strategies for strengthening geoscience education and diversity programs.
This unit from the Integrated Coordinated Science Unit Challanges explores how students can use their knowledge of chemistry to test the safety of rainwater that flows off our college campuses and streets into the ocean. The hands-on exercise uses the “5 E’s Learning Cycle: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate” and is correlated to California Science Content Standards, California Environmental Education Principles and Ocean Literacy Standards.
The Ocean Literacy Campaign is changing the way educators and the public think about ocean sciences education: teaching ocean sciences is not just enrichment, but is essential to science literacy. Read about how the Ocean Literacy Campaign is bringing about a paradigm shift in the way educators and the public think about Ocean Sciences Education.
Read about how the COSEE Network evaluates its programs to understand the collective impact of the local Centers on ocean sciences education nationally.
Together educators and ocean scientists have developed and teach a university course entitled Communicating Ocean Sciences that is now being taught in several institutions of higher education nationwide. The course is designed for undergraduate and graduate science students interested in improving their ability to communicate about complex science concepts. This paper focuses on the content, outcomes, and potential of the Communicating Ocean Sciences course.
COSEE-OS concept maps are designed to help teachers and their students understand the connections and relationships between climate & oceanography. These maps are created through discussion and collaboration and are ideal instruments in revealing their authors' understanding of a topic. For scientists, concept mapping helps them share their understanding of connections in the earth system. For educators, concept maps can be powerful tools for exposing and clarifying topics in the classroom.
This guide provides basic information for scientists who wish to engage in education and public outreach (EPO). Engaging in EPO can be an excellent way to address funding agencies’ requirements that proponents articulate the broader societal value of their research.
In this guide, EPO refers broadly to efforts to increase awareness and understanding of science. Audiences targeted by EPO can include students, teachers, children, adults, and just about any conceivable subset of these (e.g., economically disadvantaged youth, adult education instructors, museum visitors, parents, newspaper readers, high school students). Whether you are preparing a proposal or looking for tips to implement EPO effectively, this guide can help you recognize and contribute to high-quality EPO.
This guide to teaching climate change fundamental concepts to K-12 audiences is the product of a three-day workshop titled Climate and Weather Literacy: Using the AAAS Project 2061 Science Literacy Research to Develop Weather and Climate Literacy Framework held in April 2007.
COSEE Ocean Systems, with a team of researchers and other experts from the University of Maine, University of New Hampshire, and Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, was established to implement several integrated activities, each designed to improve COSEE's impact on rural and inland communities. Since fall 2005, COSEE Ocean Systems has investigated issues in educational research that pertain to pedagogy, practice, and the learning process. User feedback has reinforced the desire for interactive products and processes that highlight fundamental concepts as well as their "big picture" connections. As a result, COSEE Ocean Systems is creating and evaluating tools that both highlight basic concepts and can be readily applied to other disciplines.
Evaluation Report from the July 17-21, 2006 Teaching Science by Ocean Inquiry Summer Workshop by Sheila Pendse, Center for Research and Evaluation, College of Education and Human Development, University of Maine.
This learning activity is part of an overall series entitled "The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change". This series of three activities demonstrates some effects of rising levels of greenhouse gases on climate.
The first activity, "How Does the Make-up of the Atmosphere Affect Temperature?", asks students to construct a model to address the matter of increasing levels of greenhouse gases and their relationship to increasing atmospheric temperatures. The second activity, "How Do Higher Temperatures Affect the Water Cycle?", will demonstrate how an increase in temperature will speed up the water cycle, resulting in higher rainfall amounts followed by increased evaporation and subsequent drought. The final activity, "What Will Happen if Climate Variability and Change Cause Glacier and Polar Ice Cap Melting?", will show how the melting of ice can lead to a rise in sea level and subsequent flooding of coastal areas.
This compilation of field trips and resources related to the ocean sciences was designed by COSEE West for student, teacher and parent use. The guide includes field trip sites between San Diego and Santa Cruz and appendices on California environmental organizations, programs, and wetlands.
The Carbon Stabilization Wedge game, a unique, hands-on learning tool, helps students learn the impacts of different strategies for reducing greenhouse gases. To emphasize the need for early action, this activity strives to drive home the scale of the carbon mitigation challenge and the tradeoffs involved in planning climate policy. It uses the the concept of 'stabilization wedges' - 25 billion ton "wedges" that need to be cut out of predicted future carbon emissions in the next 50 years to avoid a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide over pre-industrial levels.
How can we use ice core data from the polar regions to investigate changes in Earth's climate past, present, and future? Students investigate climate changes going back thousands of years by graphing and analyzing ice core data from Greenland and Antarctica.
