MONITORING WELL WATER FOR ARSENIC ON MT. DESERT ISLAND: ENGAGING HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS IN INTERDISCIPLINARY AND SOCIETALLY RELEVANT WORK

Student participation in Citizen Science projects provides authentic opportunities to engage with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Practices. Students must ask good questions, learn how to analyze and interpret data in meaningful ways, and practice communicating their findings on relevant problems faced by communities. These projects often function best when run as a partnership between educational and scientific organizations. This presentation showcases one such partnership between the Mount Desert Island (MDI) Biological Laboratory, College of the Atlantic, and MDI High School, resulting from an ongoing project funded by a Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) from NIH. The project provides opportunities for secondary school teachers in Maine and New Hampshire to adapt existing groundwater curricula to include testing private wells for arsenic while engaging their students in the scientific process. Opportunities include teacher training in data collection, analysis and communication and connection to a network of scientist-mentors. Teachers then engage their students as citizen scientists so that their project results can inform actions at the local, regional, and even national level. In this local iteration of the larger project, instructors engaged students in science communication, GIS techniques, research ethics, geologic processes, water chemistry, data management and analysis, and public policy. The first few years of this project have resulted in a broader public awareness of the need for well water testing, partnerships between high school and college educators, and multiple student projects. With such a societally relevant and interdisciplinary topic, the project lends itself to being a focal point around which various components of a geoscience curriculum can be built.