EARTH SYSTEMS AS THE FOUNDATION FOR TEACHING GLOBAL CHANGE PROCESSES: ILLUSTRATING COMPLEXITY USING INFOGRAPHICS AND CONCEPTUAL MODELS

Teaching students about the causes and consequences of anthropogenic global change is a pedagogical challenge because this subject requires interdisciplinary physical and life science curricula. To understand why the unprecedented rates and magnitudes of modern global changes are causes for concern, students need to comprehend interdependencies and feedbacks among ongoing processes in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere from an historical perspective. The Understanding Global Change web resource from the UC Museum of Paleontology will use a focal infographic to help student visualize key components of Earth systems, and provide a unified framework for diverse content often taught in separate K-12 science units. This infographic not only provides scientists with a structure for presenting research within the broad context of global change, it supports educators with an outline for teaching and assessing student understanding of course content. This new approach to teaching global change within an Earth systems framework is currently being piloted and refined based on feedback from educators and scientists in anticipation of a 2016 website launch.

Global change concepts are categorized within the infographic as causes of global change (e.g., burning of fossil fuels, volcanism), ongoing Earth system processes (e.g., ocean circulation, the greenhouse effect), and the changes scientists measure in Earth’s physical and biological systems (e.g., temperature, extinctions/radiations). The infographic will appear on all website content pages, and provides a template for the creation of flowcharts, which are conceptual models that allow users to visualize the connections among Earth system processes. The infographic has already served as a learning and evaluation tool during professional development workshops for educators on global change at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The development of this resource is timely given that the newly adopted Next Generation Science Standards emphasize crosscutting concepts, including model building, and Earth system science. Flowchart activities will be available on the website to scaffold inquiry-based lessons, determine student preconceptions, and assess student content knowledge.