TRANSFER OF GEOSCIENCE FIELD RESEARCH AT LAGUNA ATASCOSA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE THROUGH AUTHENTIC INQUIRY IN THE SCIENCE CLASSROOM

National Parks are pristine, natural environments where many visitors enjoy the beauty and wildlife they offer, however, they can also serve as sources of interesting and significant problems and hence are frequently studied by scientists. Large data sets obtained through geoscience field research, such as those Texas A&M University scientists are currently conducting at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge (LANWR), are often utilized to study the complexity of national park ecosystems. However, this data can also be used to support learning in K-12 science classrooms through authentic inquiry. Texas A&M scientists are inviting students to participate in their research on hydrological and geological systems at the LANWR through a virtual field site. The use of a virtual field site offers students authenticity, complexity, and sensory immersion into the study location (Soloway et al, 1999) and facilitates the development or improvement of student's mental models of complex systems, conceptual and procedural knowledge of scientific investigations, content knowledge, and problem solving skills. The objectives of the LANWR virtual field site is to provide hierarchical virtual field study opportunities, simulations and videos, interactive GIS maps, large-scale data sets, and background materials for middle school students to use during authentic inquiry of ill-constrained problems. The website is subdivided into scaffolded exercises: exploration-based where students learn spatial distribution and environmental factors of the study location, analogy-based where students explore a study site and learn to transfer knowledge to other locations within the field site, inquiry-based where students mimic scientists with open-ended questioning and independent data collection, and abstraction-based where students explore relationships between environmental factors and different spatial and temporal scales among the field site and other case study sites (Ramasundaram et al, 2004). Each level provides the building blocks for the development of students' cognitive needs through interactivity to engage students in more meaningful learning.