PUTTING THE HORSE IN FRONT: INVESTIGATION OF TEACHER DATA AND CLIMATE LITERACY INFORMS CLIMATE SCIENCE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

As political controversy over climate change grows, teachers are increasingly asked to ‘teach both sides.’ The perceived controversy, combined with clear national standards for teaching climate science from the Next Generation Science Standards, provide urgency for teaching climate and Earth systems science, but are most middle and high school science teachers prepared to teach in this content area? A necessary first step to implementing data-rich instruction - providing student opportunities to investigate observed and predicted changes in Earth’s climate - is improving teachers’ climate science content knowledge. Equally important is addressing teachers’ data literacy skills such as collection, interpretation, and evaluation of online and gathered scientific datasets.

Through anonymous online surveys of in-service teachers, we collected responses including current use of online climate datasets and visualizations, as well as information about teachers’ climate and data literacy, and degree of college-level preparation in climate science topics. Survey results on data literacy show high skill level in reading simple graphs but significant difficulty in interpreting more complex graphs such as time series of global mean temperature anomalies. Anecdotally, we know that many teachers struggle using spreadsheets or constructing graphs. Our surveys of in-service teachers indicate that many are very interested in teaching climate science but have weak college-level preparation in the subject and are relatively unaware of climate change resources, curricula and data portals that could aid their understanding and teaching of the subject.

Using our survey results, we developed and led a 3-day professional development seminar on climate science and using authentic data around the following activities: 1- learning details of climate change science using guided and semi-open inquiry activities in conjunction with direct instruction; 2- investigating the climate system using existing data-rich online curricula (e.g. GLOBE, ESSEA, Digital RMBL, etc.); and; 3- providing teachers opportunities to investigate data portals to answer their own questions about climate and climate change. We will present results of our online climate and data literacy surveys as well as outcomes from the June 2012 workshop.