MEASURES OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS UNDERSTANDING OF TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL THINKING RELATED TO EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE

The Earth’s various systems (hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and anthrosphere) possess spatially and temporally dynamic features that present challenges to student learning. To address these challenges, two on-line modules with 5-7 labs each were developed for a high-school capstone course (http://serc.carleton.edu/eslabs/index.html), one encompassing all of the Earth’s systems and the other focusing specifically on the cryosphere. The developed modules included interactive media, hands-on lessons, links to outside resources, and formative assessment questions to promote a supportive and data-rich learning environment. Students that received the materials were those in classrooms of Texas teachers who were provided professional development to utilize the curricula and given continued support throughout the year to implement these materials into their classrooms. Students and teachers engaged with the materials were provided assessment questionnaires evaluating their content knowledge, ability to make connections across Earth systems, and understanding of temporal and spatial changes. The assessment consisted of several open-ended question sets that were evaluated using a rubric, scored, and compared to expert responses in order to determine the accuracy of the participants’ understanding. In this presentation we will discuss the pre-post test results that examined students’ systems thinking, conceptual understanding, and reasoning about time and space of Earth systems; an analysis of teacher understanding and its impact on student performance; and potential solutions to overcoming the learning challenges that were observed in collected student products.