Water Exploration: An Online High School Water Resource Education Program
Abstract
The Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin and 4empowerment.com, a Texas-based for-profit educational enterprise, teamed up with the Texas Water Development Board to develop and implement a Web-based water resources education program for Texas high school students. The program, Water Exploration uses a project-based learning approach called the Legacy Cycle model to permit students to conduct research and build an understanding about water science and critical water-related issues, using the Internet and computer technology. The three Legacy Cycle modules in the Water Exploration curriculum are: Water Basics, Water-Earth Dynamics and People Need Water. Within each Legacy Cycle there are three different challenges, or instructional modules, laid out as projects with clearly stated goals for students to carry out. Each challenge address themes that map to the water-related “Big Ideas” and supporting concepts found in the new Earth Science Literacy Principles: The Big Ideas and Supporting Concepts of Earth Science. As students work through a challenge they follow a series of steps, each of which is associated (i.e., linked online) with a manageable number of corresponding, high quality, research-based learning activities and Internet resources, including scholarly articles, cyber tools, and visualizations intended to enhance understanding of the concepts presented. The culmination of each challenge is a set of “Go Public” products that are the students’ answers to the challenge and which serve as the final assessment for the challenge. The “Go Public” products are posted to a collaborative workspace on the Internet as the “legacy” of the students’ work, thereby allowing subsequent groups of students who take the challenge to add new products. Twenty-two science educators have been trained on the implementation of the Water Exploration curriculum. A graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in science education through The University of Texas’ UTEACH program is conducting research to track the teachers’ implementation of Water Exploration and assess their comfort with cyber-education through classroom observations, students and teacher surveys, and evaluation of students’ “Go Public” products.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AGUFMED23B0717E
- Keywords:
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- 0820 EDUCATION / Curriculum and laboratory design;
- 0825 EDUCATION / Teaching methods;
- 0845 EDUCATION / Instructional tools;
- 1800 HYDROLOGY