The ERESE Project: Involving Teachers in the Online Generation and QA/QC of Enduring Teaching Resources
Abstract
The ERESE project has as its main goal to create, archive and make available "Enduring Resources in Earth Science Education" through a collaboration between teachers, scientists, librarians and information technology (IT) professionals. Over the last two years of this National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project, we have developed such ERESE resources for middle and high school teachers for use in lesson plans with "plate tectonics" and "magnetics" as their main theme. An IT environment has been developed under http://earthref.org/ERESE where researchers, teachers and students can search for and download these resources from the EarthRef.org Digital Archive (ERDA) that now contains more than 600 objects. They do this by searching for researchable questions or by browsing a "Resource Matrix" where the objects (i.e. data files) are displayed based on content (image, data or text) and expert level (1 to 9). Good examples out of the 52 predefined resource matrices are the ones on "Seafloor Spreading", "The Earth's Magnetic Field" and "Hotspots and Absolute Plate Motion". Researchers, teachers and students are encouraged to upload their own contributions in the ERDA online archive, allowing them to share research and teaching materials with their peers and beyond. These uploads can be linked with one or more resource matrices and assigned an expert level. To streamline this uploading process, we have formed a core group of resource developers (students and teachers) that generate new ERESE objects which are subject to an extensive QA/QC (Quality Assessment and Quality Control) protocol by their peers (students and teachers) and by a team of researchers. The peer-to-peer reviews ensure equality and quality amongst the various ERESE resources, whereas the science reviews screen for content correctness and scientific scholarship. The overall goal of this protocol is to ensure digital longevity and scientific validity, while the involvement of teachers and students is critical to making these resources more useful in the class room. Since the QA/QC protocol is entirely online, we are able to scale this effort to a broad, nationally relevant audience.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2005
- Bibcode:
- 2005AGUFMED23A1254K
- Keywords:
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- 0805 Elementary and secondary education;
- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- 0820 Curriculum and laboratory design;
- 0850 Geoscience education research;
- 1525 Paleomagnetism applied to tectonics: regional;
- global