Student conference on global warming:
A collaborative network-supported ecologically hierarchic Geosciences curriculum
Douglas N. Gordin*
Daniel C. Edelson
Louis M. Gomez
Eileen M. Lento
Roy D. Pea
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois
1. Introduction
A five week global warming curriculum for pre-college students has been designed as part of the
Learning through Collaborative Visualization Project (Pea, 1993). A collaborative version of the
curriculum will be enacted in January, 1996, within twenty classrooms located primarily in
Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey. The primary goals for this curriculum are:
A. Forge links between students and the scientific community around a topic of common interest.
B. Engage students in scientific investigation using current data sets, analysis tools, and
computer-communication tools.
C. Lead students to consider the earth as an interdependent ecological system that can be
analyzed in terms of cycles (especially radiative, hydrological, and carbon) and their
interactions at multiple ecological hierarchic levels (e.g., different spatiotemporal
resolutions; see below).
2. Why Global Warming?
The controversy around global warming has been growing over the past few decades. Currently,
there is an enormous amount of scientific and policy work occurring in this area. This explosion
of adult interest leads to the following advantages to studying global warming:
A. There are numerous scientific, economic, and political consequences attached to global
warming. Thus, there is a large community of practitioners that can serve as mentors for
students. Further, global change data sets are widely available on the Internet.
B. Global warming provides an example of a cross disciplinary investigation that studies the
earth as an integrated system. This is consistent with an increasing focus within the sciences
to choose systems or environments as the unit of investigation and with developments within
geosciences, in particular, to study the earth as an integrated whole. Studying the earth as a
whole provides students with an explanatory framework in which they can organize their disparate
observations and understandings.
Moreover, students have been found to be interested in global warming because it is a
controversial environmental issue:
A. Hearing both sides of the controversy often challenges students existing beliefs motivating
them to analyze the evidence so as to decide their own position.
B. Students have a natural self-interest in environmental decisions because they will bear the
brunt of environmental decisions made by their elders.
3. Structure of Global Warming Curriculum
The five week curriculum is divided into three stages: staging activities (two weeks), student
project (two weeks), and synthesis through presentations and critique (one week). The purposes
of these stages are as follows:
A. Staging activities are designed to introduce students to a new area of inquiry.
The first imperative is to build student interest in the topic. After motivating student
interest, a series of structured activities are presented that are organized around
"natural" beginning questions. The activities are designed to answer student questions
through analyzing influential data sets, examining "what-if scenarios" through
spreadsheet modeling, and performing laboratory experiments. These activities provides
familiarity with basic principles (e.g., an energy balance must be maintained) and techniques
(e.g., graphing data) while also modeling scientific inquiry.
B. Projects encourage students to take on more of the executive functions of scientific inquiry,
such as, choosing a topic, finding or creating data sets, and drawing conclusions and detailing
limitations on the extent of those conclusions.
Student projects are the heart of the enterprise. In projects students are encouraged to bring
together the concerns of the scientific community with their own interests, leading to student
involvement in scientific inquiry. Projects are conducted in groups of two to four in order to
promote students learning from one another, learning to share tasks, and to accomplish more
ambitious tasks than a single student could reasonably complete.
C. Synthesis is accomplished through students presenting their work to one another and then
coming to a classwide consensus on a related issue.
Student presentations provide a culmination to project work as well as the impetus to
crystallize their findings into a form that permits succinct communication to their peers.
Through presentations students find out what their peers have accomplished and learn from them.
The need to come to a classwide consensus provides a context where students must develop a common
language in which they can negotiate their opinions, beliefs, and knowledge.
The activities designed to achieve these purposes are now described.
4. Staging Activities
The purposes of the staging activities are to motivate student interest, illustrate scientific
principles and techniques through "natural" questions, and model student inquiry.
Motivation - Controversy can be an excellent motivation for students. The controversy
surrounding global warming is presented through videotapes where experts make conflicting
predictions on the likelihood of global warming and its probable impact on human life. In
particular, disagreements between Stephen H. Schneider and Richard S. Lindzen are often shown
to summarize the conflicting viewpoints and to show the disagreement is occurring between
leading scientists in the field.
Questions - In order to lead students into the topic common questions are used as the
basis for the initial activities. The following questions and activities comprise the bulk of
the staging activities.
A. Is global warming just natural variation?
-
An example of natural variation is provided by studying seasonal change. The seasons are
investigated by examining monthly mean visualizations of insolation (i.e., sunlight) and
surface temperature for different seasons of the year using the Greenhouse Effect Visualizer
(Gordin et. al., 1995).
-
An example of "unnatural" variation is provided by graphing increasing levels of
atmospheric carbon-dioxide as measured at Mauna Loa (Keeling and Whorf, 1994) over the past
thirty-five years. In this context, "unnatural" means an anthropogenic forcing
(i.e., a human impact on the environment).
-
Finally, the unknown case in point is examined: Is the rise in average global temperature
over the past century the result of natural or "unnatural" variation (Jones et.
al., 1994).
-
B. Why is a 3°C change in average global temperature important?
-
To provide a context for students to evaluate this change the average global temperature for
the past 165,000 years are provided on 100 year intervals (Jouzel et.al., 1994). Using this
record students can see the how little variability has occurred and that a 5°C drop
signifies the onset of an ice age.
-
Using a Blackbody model to convert between temperature and energy the amount of additional
energy that a 1°C change would cause to flow through the earth-atmosphere system can be
calculated (using a base temperature of 288°K the answer is over 2000 Terra Watts). A
spreadsheet calculator is provided for students to calculate energy increases of this sort.
Students are then asked to speculate on what effects this additional energy flow might have
by consulting a chart on the energy consumption of various phenomena (e.g., annual human
energy production amounts to 10 TW, annual life processes consume 92 TW, and evaporation uses
44,000 TW; Taube, 1985).
C. How is the global temperature maintained?
-
A "greenhouse effect in a bottle" activity was adopted from the GEMs global
warming curriculum (Hocking et. al., 1990). This activity has students expose two plastic
bottles partially filled with dirt to a light bulb. One of the bottles is covered with
plastic wrap, while the other is open at the top. Thermometers are placed in both and
readings made once a minute for ten minutes. This experiment demonstrates a temperature rise
in both bottles which then stabilize as their dynamic equilibriums are reached. This
experiment provides an example of how systems reach a temperature equilibrium and how the
equilibrium point can be raised by inhibiting the release of energy from the system.
-
The impact of the biosphere on climate is illustrated by a microworld simulation of
Daisyworld (Simon and Poole, 1992), the model developed by Lovelock to illustrate the Gaia
hypothesis (Lovelock, 1988).
D. What scientific and policy work is going on in the area of global warming?
Using the World Wide Web (WWW) and other information resources students search for scientific and
political investigations on global warming. The WWW is rich in such resources, for example, the
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has made available visualizations of model
predictions of world temperature if a doubling occurred in carbon-dioxide levels (see
http://www.iiasa.ac.at) and the United Nations Environment
Programme has published the resolutions of the Earth Summits where international regulations on
the emissions of greenhouse gas were negotiated (see
http://www.unep.ch/).
Modeling a model of what student investigations should look like is provided by the above
structured activities as well as providing examples of prior student reports. Excellent examples
of student reports can be found from the ESSC project (see
http://www.circles.org/ESSC/).
5. Student Projects
Projects provide an opportunity for students to intermix their individual concerns with the
issues of global warming. The projects are conducted by groups of students and fall into one of
two categories: a country project or a global issue project. In order to facilitate these
projects relevant data sets will be organized and provided to the students (e.g., greenhouse
gas emissions by country, model based predictions of temperature, and Paleolithic data sets based
on proxies such as oxygen isotopes and tree rings).
Country projects - Countries are a useful unit of analysis because greenhouse gas
emissions vary based on a countries energy usage and choice of energy production. Further,
policy measures are implemented in terms of countries. Focusing on a country can also provide
students a way to approach the project, since students often have interests in specific countries
(e.g., due to place of birth, location of family members, or vacation site). Students choice of
which country they want to represent (i.e., investigate) is facilitated by providing a list of
several dozen countries organized into the following categories: major carbon-dioxide emitters,
countries in danger of flooding, countries that experience monsoons, developing countries, and
mega-biodiverse countries. Projects that a country group might choose are:
A. Analyze a countries past greenhouse gas emissions and predict future levels. Discuss these
levels in context of international policy initiatives and global emission levels.
B. Discuss the impact on a countries agriculture, severe weather, or threat from flooding using
an established global warming scenario (e.g., doubling of carbon-dioxide levels within 100 years).
Global Issue projects - A global or earth systems perspective is the primary way global
warming has been analyzed. In particular, an ecological analysis focusing on cycles and dynamic
equilibrium are prevalent modes of analysis within global change studies, in general, and global
warming, in particular. The primary cycles of interest with respect to global warming are energy,
hydrological, and carbon cycles. It is also important for students to choose the appropriate time
dimension along which they will study. Some students will look at Paleolithic data sets, while
others will look at model-based predictions. Projects that a global issues group might choose are:
A. Examine the correlation between average global temperature and carbon-dioxide levels as
measured from ice cores. Assuming carbon-dioxide is a forcing agent on temperature what
temperatures would be predicted by these data if carbon-dioxide levels doubled. A similar
analysis could be performed using insolation levels and temperature data. These two
investigations encapsulate the ongoing argument whether temperature variations are determined by
internal or external forcing functions (i.e., by varying composition of atmospheric gases or
varying levels of solar input).
B. Using existing "fast plants curricula" from University of Wisconsin (see
http://fastplants.cals.wisc.edu/) students could
compute increases in plant growth rate due to increased carbon levels. This data can then be used
to provide a rough prediction of how rising carbon levels would impact forest growth and the
global carbon cycle.
6. Synthesis through Presentations and Critique
It is in the culminating week that the curriculum best earns its title of a "Student
Conference on Global Warming". First, students give brief presentations of their work to one
another. Second, students critique the key piece of global warming international legislation to
date, namely, First World and Eastern European countries (i.e., the former USSR and its
satellites) should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. It is
not intended that comprehensive critiques be made nor need a revised policy be suggested.
Instead, specific issues and examples should be explored. For example, one class might critique
the proposal by detailing what cutbacks would be necessitated locally. Another class could
evaluate whether the policy reaches its objectives, even if the agreement is followed to the
letter, and if not by how much it falls short. Another class could consider what policies might
be applicable for developing countries, and so on. The primary goal is for classwide conversation
and debate to occur and for that discussion to draw on the students' earlier investigations
including both country and global issue projects.
7. Use of Computer Networks and Collaboration at a Distance
The extensive reliance on analyzing data sets requires students obtain digital forms of the data.
The WWW is used to provide students access to the data by providing an on-line version of the
curriculum along with spreadsheet files that can be downloaded. The spreadsheet files are
provided in the industry standard SYLK format. If a suitable "helper application" is
configured for the WWW browser the spreadsheet application is executed and the appropriate file
loaded. In this way, the WWW becomes a shell or top-level interface to the curriculum and the
analysis tools. Similarly, visualizations to be analyzed are directly available through the WWW.
Advantages of providing the curriculum as networked resource include the ease and speed with
which it can be updated, the ability to couple the curriculum to heterogeneous computational
tools (e.g., for data analysis or model simulation), and as a ubiquitous delivery system.
The curriculum as described till now could be implemented stand-alone in an individual classroom.
However, there are opportunities for collaborative involvement between classrooms and involving
scientists and policy specialists. This opportunity for collaboration should provide unique
opportunities for teachers and students to build on each other's diverse skills and knowledge.
These collaborative activities will take place when the curriculum is jointly conducted in some
twenty classrooms in early 1996 under the auspices of the Learning through Collaborative
Visualization Project. The opportunities for collaboration are as follows:
A. Threads of conversation can be conducted between students and teachers in different classrooms
using a multi-user writing facility called the Collaboratory Notebook (Edelson and O'Neill,
1994). This facility should be particularly useful when students are engaged in their projects,
since students in other classrooms will likely be working along similar lines. For example, all
students researching greenhouse gas emissions in Eastern European countries might share a thread
of conversation on why those countries predominately use coal and what possibilities might exist
for changing to a different means of energy production.
B. Following student presentations in the final week each class will select the two best projects
as voted on by the students and selected by the teacher. Each of these student projects will be
sent to scientists and policy specialists who will read them and write a brief critique. These
reports and critiques will be published on the WWW.
C. The classwide critiques of international policy will be gathered together and submitted to a
policy organization for comment. The critiques and comments will then be made available to
teachers and students.
Through providing students with critique on their work from the scientific community a audience
is provided that can provide insightful commentary on their work. Further, student work
containing an inspirational approach or well thought out piece of analysis stands the chance of
being picked up and used within the global warming debate.
8. Understanding in terms of Ecological Hierarchies
A fundamental means to organize systems and phenomena in the geosciences is along spatiotemporal
dimensions (e.g., geological time or a logarithmic spatial scale). Hence, virtually any
introductory text on geology, climate, oceanography, or astronomy early on presents a diagram
presenting phenomena at different orders of magnitude. A more general form of this type of
analysis is called ecological hierarchies (O'Neill et. al., 1986) where the level of analysis
spans not only spatiotemporal resolution but also which entities are to be included in the
analysis. For example, there are models of global climate which incorporate both the atmosphere
and ocean while others rely on only one or the other -- the distinction here is not on
spatiotemporal resolution but on which quantities are included in the model.
This ecologically hierarchic mode of analysis is crucial to understanding the issue of global
warming. Much of the scientific research and debate can be explicated in these terms. For
example, critiques of models often focus on inadequate spatial resolution or their failure to
include certain phenomena such as the biosphere. Global warming research employs data in a wide
variety of ecological hierarchies and much debate in the field centers on what ecological
hierarchy is the best one with which to analyze data. This leads to the need for students to be
sensitive to differing levels of ecological hierarchy and to be able to strategically employ the
appropriate level for their investigation.
Several methods have been employed to familiarize students with this idea of ecological hierarchy
in understanding global warming:
A. Data for certain quantities are provided at multiple temporal resolutions (e.g., average
global temperature data provided yearly for a 100 years and every 100 years for 165,000 years.
B. Data are provided at multiple spatial resolutions (e.g., the Greenhouse Effect Visualizer
provides a means to select at what resolution data is visualized by providing resolutions ranging
from 2.5° square to an average global value).
C. Experiments are performed to model global phenomena (e.g., the "greenhouse effect in a
bottle" experiment models the effect of the earth's atmosphere).
D. Student projects occur at two different spatial levels, that is, country projects and global
issue projects. Further, for global issue projects several scales of data is provided ranging
from Paleolithic data sets, to recent climatic statistics, to model based predictions of the near
future.
E. Classwide critiques of international policy can focus on either global or local ramifications.
9. Empirical Studies on Curriculum
A variety of data will be collected from the classrooms to aid in formative and summative
evaluation. Each classroom will administer a pretest and posttest designed to evaluate student
understanding global warming. In particular, questions are asked on the cause of the seasons,
geological time, the greenhouse effect, the impact of changes in the average global temperature
on human life, the atmosphere, carbon-dioxide emissions, and the role of sunlight in the Earth's
radiative balance. In addition, teachers will categorize the activities that their classroom
engaged in and enumerate which staging activities were used and how they were adapted. A sample
of student reports and all the classwide critiques will be collected and analyzed. In addition,
at least one class will be observed.
10. Summary
A networked curriculum for global warming has been described that encourages collaboration
between students, classrooms, and adult practitioners and that emphasizes using data from
different ecologically hierarchic levels. The curriculum is divided into three stages, building
from structured activities to project inquiry and culminating in presentations and critique which
are designed as synthesis activities. The global warming curriculum should appeal to a broad
range of students as it can be motivating on the following dimensions: it provides an opportunity
to investigate a controversial environmental issue and to use advanced communication and
computing environments, it provides ample opportunities to work with other students including
group projects, and it provides incentives through the opportunity for project reports to be read
and critiqued by adult practitioners and to be published on the WWW reaching a wide audience.
11. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful for research support of the Learning through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis)
Project by the National Science Foundation Grant RED-9454729, the Illinois State Board of
Education/Eisenhower Program, by Apple Computer, Inc., External Research, by Sun Microsystems,
and by our industrial partners Ameritech and Bellcore. We would also like to thank our colleagues
from the CoVis Project and community of users for extended discussions of these issues, and
continual useful feedback on design, rationale, and pedagogical issues.
This work was powerfully shaped and substantially aided by Patricia Carlson and her 1994-1995
Environmental Science class at New Trier High School. It was there that the idea of building such
a curriculum was born and its overall direction set.
This curriculum has benefited from consulting several other curriculum, especially the GEMS
Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming Curriculum whom we also thank for permission to use one of
their activities.
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