ELEVATING THE STANDARDS: USING THE NEXT GENERATION SCIENCE STANDARDS TO PROMOTE GEOSCIENCE AWARENESS IN STEM HIGH SCHOOLS

The NSF GEOPATHS-IMPACT Project, “Early College High School Pathways to Geoscience Majors and Careers: Full STEAM Ahead!” seeks to aid in the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards at a STEM high school, the STEAM Academy in Lexington, Kentucky. Faculty and graduate students from the University of Kentucky’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences have been working alongside the school’s Ninth Grade Integrated Science teacher to craft lesson plans, lab activities, and project-based learning exercises. Through this venture, we hope to promote geoscience as a viable career path to high school students who may not have previously considered the option. The Integrated Science class provides an excellent laboratory for this, as most of the content is derived from earth and space sciences.

Our model for collaboration has been in a state of flux since the initial project proposal, and continues to evolve as we determine how best to take advantage of personnel and facilities. For the first year of the program, we endeavored to find a suitable model that followed the academic calendar instituted by the school, while permitting content experts from UK to make valuable contributions to lesson plans. Given the accelerated pace of curriculum coverage at the school, we often found that there was not sufficient time to implement all of the lab activities and extracurricular activities that EES personnel favored. Since then, we have been crafting a full semester of course content through the school’s Canvas online learning platform. This includes modules that follow directly from the NGSS core content for each subject unit. Each module is tailored to a specific content standard, and includes dynamic vocabulary lists, at least one lab or mini-project, introductory content slideshows, and pre- and post-content quizzes to assess the efficacy of the module in content learning and retention. These modules also facilitate a flipped classroom approach, which is a method we are keen to try this academic year. We will no doubt continue to adjust our approach to the project as we gauge the success of previous iterations, and discover more about student attitudes toward the geosciences.