Facilitating Students Understanding Change in the Earth System on Multiple Time Scales

With the current urgency to develop a climatically literate society there is an increasing need for today's students to sufficiently understand how the Earth system changes. It is also vital that they understand the processes that cause those changes so they will be prepared to address the environmental challenges of the future. However, grasping change over time, especially on multiple time scales ranging from daily to ice age variations, is a challenge. In this presentation we will describe 1) the sequence of scaffolded activities and investigations we are developing that will help students more fully understand how the cryosphere changes on multiple time scales, and how the cryosphere impacts and is impacted by the other components of the Earth system; and 2) the study we are conducting to investigate the effectiveness of these activities and investigations in helping students understand how and why a component of the Earth system varies over time. The results of this effort will serve as a foundation for the development of a full scale capstone high-school course that will reside within the structure of EarthLabs, an online set of inquiry-based modules on a range of Earth system science topics that will more completely address the issues of climate literacy.