The Development and Evaluation of the Climate Time Line Information Tool

The Climate Time Line Information Tool or CTL (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl) has been prototyped as a digital educational tool for conveying fundamental climatic processes and their human dimension for diverse audiences. Using a powers of ten approach to temporal scaling, the CTL website was developed through a CIRES Innovative Research Grant by Mark McCaffrey at the National Climatic Data Center's Paleoclimatology Program and Dan Kowal at the National Geophysical Data Center. CTL was specifcally designed as an interdisciplinary tool for conveying information about weather and climatic processes, such as the diurnal, annual and orbital cycles and ENSO. Moreover, the web site explores potential connections between climatic variability and human development over the past 100,000 years. Evaluation of the prototype examined issues of usability and navigation of the site as well as how its content and framework served the needs of undergraduate, middle and high school students, geoscience educators, and climate experts. The development and evaluation of the Climate Time Line provide a case study for other geoscience researchers and educators on: i) how objectives were set by developers; ii) how evaluators were involved in assessing the prototype; iii) the variety of evaluative methods available to test the viability of the product; and iv) how results from the evaluation can be used to finalize the prototype.