HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT UNDERSTANDING OF THE CRYOSPHERE

Understanding how students communicate science knowledge is essential in developing effective approaches to science education. We present an in-depth analysis to how high-school students convey their knowledge about the cryosphere before and after a specially designed intervention. Student responses to two short answer questions were coded to determine the level of complexity and causality within each response. Students from three schools completed a pre- and post-test pertaining to the cryosphere. In between the tests, students completed an online EarthLabs (http://serc.carleton.edu/dev/earthlabs/cryosphere/index.html) module depicting cryosphere change over annual, decadal, and longer timescales. Time spent on this instructional intervention ranged from several hours to weeks depending on the classroom time available to the implementing teacher. Students' written responses were converted into box-and-arrow diagrams, with boxes for events and arrows for processes. Diagrams were scored in relation to numbers of boxes, arrows and connections between boxes and arrows. Qualitative and statistical comparisons between pre- and post-instructional responses provide insight into student understanding of the cryosphere. We find that some students gained deeper understanding of the cryosphere, although overall students did not increase the level of complexity in their responses. These results suggest that additional time interacting with the full EarthLabs module could improve student understanding of Earth system, particularly cryosphere, complexity.