Best Practices

Investigator: Dawn Bish dsbish@uncg.edu

Educating the Environment: The Coral Reef Project Subject Area and Population: The Coral Reef project (one of the many
modules of the Educating the Environment (ETE) series) is designed to promote science-literate and reflective students who are knowledgeable of the earth's processes and their responsibilities for stewardship. The Coral Reef project has two challenges built into the module, one for students in grades 5 through 8 and the other for grades 9 through 12.

Description of Best Practice

The Coral Reef project prompts students to address coral reef destruction and think about biodiversity worldwide. Students identify possible sources of coral reef destruction, examine conflicting evidence, evaluate possible courses of action, and make recommendations. As they do this, students look at man's impact on the global environment.

Background
Education's purpose includes preparing people to lead fulfilling and responsible lives. Science education should help students understanding the biophysical environment and human interaction with that environment. Such understanding should lead to informed decisions concerning how humans treat their life-support system, the biosphere. The current teaching tools, however, seem to be making little impact in elementary and secondary schools Current teaching include reading textbooks, teacher guided experiments and curriculum and tasks involving teacher led programs. It has been found that a teacher spend 70% of the time talking to students in front of the classroom instead of actively involving students in hands on learning. Studies show that science learning at the high school level has little effect upon students' science literacy, including their understanding of basic concepts, the process of science, or the impact of science on society. ETEs experience and research indicate that change in science classroom methodology can lead to student understanding of critical issues. The goal is to engage and motivate students to explore and understand issues in depth. The challenge is to provide teachers with alternative approaches to teaching and learning that will achieve this goal.

Coral Reefs of the World

Conceptual Framework
The Coral Reef Project uses problembased learning (PBL) and active learning as part the curriculum development as it develops both problem solving strategies and disciplinary knowledge bases and skills by placing students in the active role of problem-solvers confronted with an illstructured problem that mirrors realworld problems. What is desired is a real-world program that combines science content and skills to create useful experiences for learners by drawing connections between students' lives and the Earth's interacting environmental subsystems and environmental resource issues. The benefits of PBL include engagement in learning due to cognitive dissonance, relevance to real-world scenarios, opportunities for critical thinking, metacognitive growth, and real-world authenticity that promotes transfer and recall. The Coral Reef Project is an interdisciplinary problem based learning module. The project engages student teams in addressing real-world problems related to the problems facing the Coral Reef destruction including global warming, over fishing, biodiversity, pollution and deforestation. The use of collaborative learning also plays an important factor in learning. The students work in teams to access resources, analyze data and address the problem.

Technology and Management Plan

The Coral Reef Project starts off with a scenario and background information about Coral Reefs. Then there is a presentation of a challenge based on the grade level of the student. The Coral Reef Project materials have enough information to get students started with the problem set. Background information is provided, but the Coral Reef Project has purposely avoided duplicating everything available about a given subject. Within the World Wide Web and other Internet features is a seemingly infinite amount of information. In the Coral Reef Project, the students are pointed in additional areas of the internet provided in the resources section. Students have to conduct Internet and Web searches to find materials. Teachers are encouraged to avoid having the student groups rely solely on the electronic or on-line materials. Students must be encouraged to divide the work through a delegation of tasks. Some students may be working with the computer while others are finding or using written references, seeking out and interviewing experts, or using other audiovisual aids

manipulations are done in the classroom by students using image processing software. In addition to mastering one of these specialized software products and learning to interpret remotely-sensed images, Coral Reef Project students collect, analyze, generate, and transmit information using computers. They use email to communicate their findings to Coral Reef Project students at other schools and to contact scientists for answers to questions. They use computers to search the Internet at large for information leading to a satisfactory solution to the problem they are trying to solve. Finally, they use word-processing software or hypertext markup language (html) to create a report on how they approached a problem.

. The remotely-sensed satellite images used in the Coral Reef Project are images of the earth taken from NASA satellites or aircraft, which students download from the Internet. The images, however, are not taken by ordinary cameras, and they may vary from traditional photographs in many ways, especially in color and scale. Interpreting them may involve physical manipulation (cropping, rotating) or mathematical manipulation (processing) of the digital data stored in the pixel array of the image. These

Critical Assessment of the Project

The Coral Reef Project utilizes numerous web based resources such as websites, teacher pages, peer to peer communication and email with scientists working in the field. The teacher pages were especially helpful in guiding the learning strategies for each age level of the module. Teacher pages provide problem questions student may need to ask, terms the student will encounter, preparation checklists and even other modules that will help with the lesson planning (for example: for Coral Reefs, the teacher page recommends El Nino module which addresses global warming). The use of Remote Sensing Images provides numerous amounts of information about the health of coral reefs. By having the student downloading information, changing the image resolution as well as monitoring images over time, the student is learning to be an active participant in the environment. Students are also learning about climate and weather control via remote sensing. This monitoring of sea temperatures, cloud cover, weather and coral reef changes brings to life the idea that the student is a part of the world he lives in and must realize the impact he has on the environment. Instead of just

reading about climate control, sea temperatures and the impact on coral reefs, students are actually visually seeing the impact people have on the environment. Although the concept of the Coral Reef Project is very well thought out and comprehensive, some of the resources and software programs used are outdated. Upon navigating the resources section, this evaluator found many of the sites were no longer found on the web or had moved to another website. The software students need to master is no longer used today. This site would greatly benefit from so much needed updating of resource links and software. Despite this problem, the program is a good best practices model.

Thematically Related Web Links

World Resources Institute: Coral Reefs Coral Reef Protection Exploring the Environment: Global Climate Change El Nino: The Child Returns

Conceptually Related Web Links

Collaborative Learning Active Learning Problem Based Learning

Glossary of Terms
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered instructional strategy in which students collaboratively solve problems and reflect on their experiences. For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning back

Collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. More specifically, collaborative learning is based on the model that knowledge can be created within a population where members actively interact by sharing experiences and take on asymmetry roles. For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_learning

back Active learning is an umbrella term that refers to several models of instruction that focus the responsibility of learning on learners.
For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning back