DEVELOPING AN EARTH SCIENCE LITERACY FRAMEWORK

The Earth Science Literacy Initiative is developing community consensus regarding what every person should know about earth science. This NSF-sponsored, inter-agency effort has created a document that contains the Big Ideas and Supporting Concepts that underlie the research fields funded through the NSF-EAR division. Multiple workshops, meeting presentations, and rounds of web-based commenting has gone into the creation of the document. The ESLI document has nine Big Ideas which follow the themes of (1) Process of Earth Science, (2) Earth's history, (3) Earth's complex interacting systems, (4) the evolving geosphere, (5) water-related processes, (6) Earth's controls on the evolution of life, (7) Earth's resources, (8) natural hazards and human risks, and (9) human impacts on the Earth. Supporting concepts provide the related detail necessary to understand the Big Ideas. The Earth Science Literacy document has a strong anthropomorphic bias with three of the Big Ideas (resources, hazards and human impacts) relating directly to human interactions with the Earth. This bias is justified by the increasing significance of Earth science-related topics such as increasing population, climate change, and scarcity of resources. Literacy documents from the ocean, atmosphere and climate communities have already had large impacts and the same is expected for the earth science literacy framework. The document will provide a foundation for future K-12 educational standards and K-16 textbooks, provide the basis for the displays and programs of informal education venues, and provide guidance for future governmental agency decisions in the earth sciences.