TEACHING AN INQUIRY -BASED EARTH SCIENCE CLASS TO INNER CITY YOUTH

As part of a 3-year grant from Lucent Technologies, the Science Museum of Minnesota's Youth Science Center Field School (YSCFS) developed a partnership with 4 area high schools to help teach earth sciences as part of their curriculum. North High in Minneapolis is the pilot program for the first year with the other schools joining in the second year. Classes emphasize geology and paleontology and are supplemented with trips to the Science Museum and our ability to bring cast fossil material to the classroom for lectures and hands-on study. When weather permits, field trips are taken to numerous locations to study local geology and give the students a practical example to apply skills learned in the classroom (eg., mapping and sample collection.)

Critical to the success of these classes is the involvement of the students and the ability to keep their interest levels high. With an 80 minute time block, students begin a class (30-40 minutes) in a given topic with hands on specimens and then research those topics in the classroom via the internet for the remainder of the class. Students are given a list of inquiry-based research topics to choose for a class project, many of which are fossil specimens that can be studied at the museum. Once the research is complete they present their findings in poster form, following standard scientific formats. Students are given the opportunity to support the research of the museum with a number of projects such as sorting microfossils to identifying late Cretaceous marine fossils.

We will provide data on our assessment of the program, samples of student research projects and how to develop an inquiry-based research program for students.