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 Curriculum
Structure
Introduction
5-E Learning Cycle Model
Curriculum Design
Assessment Issues: General Approach
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INTRODUCTION
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EarthComm is divided into five modules. Each EarthComm module
has three chapters connected to each other by a common theme.
Every chapter begins by asking questions about how various Earth
science phenomena affect the student's community. Students develop
answers to those questions by learning key ideas and understandings
in the chapter activities. It is intended that the modules and
chapters can be taught in any sequence. Teachers will need to
consider the best sequence for their own students.
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Modules and Chapters
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I. Earth's Dynamic Geosphere
Volcanoes and Your Community
Earthquakes and Your Community
Plate Tectonics and Your Community
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II. Understanding Your Environment
Bedrock Geology of Your Community
River Systems of Your Community
Land Use Planning in Your Community
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III. Earth's Fluid Spheres
Oceans and Your Community
Severe Weather and Your Community
Cryosphere and Your Community
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IV. Earth's Natural Resources
Energy Resources of Your Community
Mineral Resources and Your Community
Water Resources and Your Community
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V. Earth System Evolution
Astronomy and Your Community
Climate Change and Your Community
Changing Life in Your Community
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Just as teachers need to determine which chapters are best to
use, workshop presenters will want to decide on the chapters and/or
activities that would be best to use with their participants.
Because of the excitement students feel about volcanoes, that
chapter in the Dynamic Geosphere module is seen by many as a good
starting place, and is used in this workshop guide to provide
examples of key concepts in EarthComm. Following that, and depending
on the time available, additional chapters may be done. In the
one-day schedule that is provided, "Water Resources and Your
Community" is used in the afternoon. In the weeklong schedule,
participants move quickly through all of the remaining chapters.
For workshops with limited time, local considerations will influence
those choices.
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5-E
LEARNING CYCLE MODEL
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Each Chapter follows the 5-E lesson model: engage, explore, explain,
elaborate, evaluate. Trowbridge & Bybee (1990) present the
5-E learning cycle in Becoming A Secondary School Science Teacher
as an effective instructional model that is consistent with a
constructivist approach to learning. In the model students encounter
phenomena experientially (engage, explore) prior to having general
rules stated that help them articulate underlying principles (explain.)
Then, the skills and new knowledge are transferred to new situations
(elaborate) and/or have their understanding enriched through additional
experience. Student readiness to make meaning of additional experience
is assessed (evaluation) before the cycle begins again. The component
of the chapter that relates to each stage of the 5-E learning
cycle is below
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CURRICULUM
DESIGN
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EarthComm modules have three chapters connected to a common theme.
Every chapter begins with a community-based problem or issue that
can only be solved by developing key ideas and understandings
in the chapter activities. Activities follow a learning cycle
model.
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Component of EarthComm
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What happens in
the classroom
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Stage of
5-E Learning Cycle
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CHAPTER CHALLENGE
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Students read and discuss a scenario that presents a community-based
issue to solve through Earth science and inquiry. They also
explore the criteria and expectations for solving the challenge.
Teachers allow students to share their current thinking
openly and without closure.
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Engage
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1. Think About It
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Students answer an open-ended question (or two) that sets
the context for an activity and provides the teacher with
a pre-assessment of their ideas. At times, students might
be observing and responding to a teacher demonstration.
They briefly discuss their ideas in groups and/or as a class.
Teachers allow students to share their ideas openly. They
avoid assigning formal labels to concepts or seeking closure.
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Engage
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2. Investigate
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Students collaborate on an inquiry activity that requires
hands-on work, literature or web research, or fieldwork.
Teachers facilitate and guide student-driven inquiry.
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Explore
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3. Reflecting on the Activity and the Challenge
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Students read a brief summary of the main ideas explored
in the investigation and their relationship to the challenge.
Teachers review the main ideas with students and affirm
the relevance of the activity to the challenge.
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Explain
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4. Digging Deeper
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Students read text, illustrations and photographs that
explain concepts explored in the investigation. Terms are
defined and clarified.
Teachers provide further information and clarification of
concepts through lecture, slides, videos, or laser disk
presentations.
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Explain
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5. Check Your Understanding
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Students respond to several questions related to the primary
content goals of the reading (Digging Deeper). They re-read
the material when they encounter difficulty answering these
questions.
Teachers review student responses and encourage students
to revisit the reading when they have difficulty explaining
the main points in their own words, either verbally or in
writing.
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Explain
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6. Applying What You Have Learned
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Students respond to questions that check their understanding
of key principles and concepts (learning goals) for the
activity. New, yet familiar situations and scenarios provide
contexts for students to apply their developing understandings.
Teachers review student responses and use the questions
to further probe and hone understanding of key learning
goals.
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Elaborate
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7. Preparing for the Chapter Challenge
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Students put their investigative results into the context
of the challenge by preparing or organizing their work as
it relates to their final product.
Teachers review student performance in terms of its consistency
with criteria set forth in the expectations for the activity
and the challenge.
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Elaborate/
Evaluate
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8. Inquiring Further
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Students are presented with options for deepening their
understanding of concepts and skills developed within the
activity.
Teachers promote and encourage further inquiry.
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Elaborate/
Evaluate
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CHAPTER ASSESSMENT
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Students present their solution to the chapter challenge
in a variety of formats and consider ways to share their
findings beyond the classroom.
Teachers use the challenge expectations to assess the extent
to which student work demonstrates mastery of concepts and
skills. They also explore creative ways to share student
solutions with the community.
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Evaluate
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ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT
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Students respond to a chapter test of essential knowledge
and skills targeted throughout the chapter and developed
by the teacher.
Teachers score and review the test with students. They help
students to understand how to use the results to guide future
efforts.
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Evaluate
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EarthComm curriculum development was guided by ten fundamental
ideas that are emphasized in all modules, and are the primary
goals for student learning. It is important to take the time to
go over these in a workshop. One approach to doing this is to
have the teachers make a list of their own broad goals, as they
see them, for Earth science instruction, and then compare them
with these "big ideas." Experience shows that the lists
generally compare favorably, with major differences usually coming
about as a result of some goals being stated in more specific
terms than these. In that case, the "big ideas" that
the goals fit within are usually readily apparent.
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EarthComm "Big Ideas"
- Earth science literacy empowers us to understand our
environment, make wise decisions that affect quality of
life, and manage resources, environments, and hazards.
- Earth's dynamic equilibrium system contains subsystems
from atoms to planetary spheres. Materials interact among
these subsystems due to natural forces and energy that
flows from sources inside and outside of the planet. These
interactions, changes, forces and flows tend to occur
in offsetting directions and amounts. Materials tend to
flow in chains, cycles, and webs that tend toward equilibrium
states in which energy is distributed as uniformly as
possible. The net result is a state of balanced change
or dynamic equilibrium, a condition that appears to have
existed for billions of years.
- Change through time produced Earth, the net result
of constancy, gradual changes, and episodic changes over
human, geological, and astronomical scales of time and
space.
- Extraterrestrial influences upon Earth include extraterrestrial
energy, materials, and influences due to Earth's position
and motion as a subsystem of an evolving solar system,
galaxy, and universe.
- The dynamic geosphere includes a rocky exterior upon
which ecosystems and human communities developed and a
partially molten interior with convection circulation
that generates the magnetosphere and drives plate tectonics.
It contains resources that sustain life, causes natural
hazards that may threaten life, and affects all of Earth's
other geospheres.
- Fluid spheres within the Earth system include the hydrosphere,
atmosphere, and cryosphere, which interact and flow to
produce ever-changing weather, climate, glaciers, seascapes,
and water resources. These affect human communities, shape
the land, transfer Earth materials and energy, and change
surface environments and ecosystems.
- Dynamic environments and ecosystems are produced by
the interaction of all the geospheres at the Earth's surface,
and include many different environments, ecosystems, and
communities that affect one another and change through
time.
- Earth resources include the nonrenewable and renewable
supplies of energy, and mineral and water resources. Individuals
and communities depend upon these resources in order to
maintain quality of life and economic prosperity.
- Natural hazards associated with Earth processes and
events include drought, floods, storms, volcanic activity,
earthquakes, and climate change. They pose risks to humans,
their property, and communities. Earth science is used
to study, predict, and mitigate natural hazards so that
we can assess risks, plan wisely, and acclimate to the
effects of natural hazards.
- In order to sustain the presence and quality of human
life, humans and communities must understand their dependency
on Earth resources and environments, realize how they
influence Earth systems, appreciate Earth's carrying capacity,
manage and conserve nonrenewable resources and environments,
develop alternate sources of energy and materials needed
for human sustenance, and invent new technologies.
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ASSESSMENT
ISSUES: GENERAL APPROACH
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Assessment is one of the key areas of classroom teaching that
participants ask about when trying to envision implementing EarthComm.
In any curriculum model, the mode of instruction and the mode
of assessment are connected. In the best scheme, instruction and
assessment are aligned in both content and process. However, to
the extent that one becomes an impediment to reform of the other,
they can also be uncoupled. EarthComm uses multiple assessment
formats. Some are non-traditional and are consistent with reform
movements in science education that EarthComm is designed to promote.
Project-based assessment, for example, is built into every EarthComm
"Chapter Challenge." At the same time, the developers
acknowledge the need to support teachers whose classroom context
does not allow them to depart completely from traditional assessment
formats, such as paper and pencil tests.
EarthComm includes two primary forms of assessment. The most
integral form of assessment is project-based and relies on the
chapter projects that the students complete for each "Chapter
Challenge". The second is a more traditional multiple-choice
pre-/post-test that can be used as needed. To facilitate the use
of the chapter reports as assessment devices, Teacher's Editions
of EarthComm modules provide a general scoring rubric. In this
use, a rubric is "an established set of criteria for scoring
or rating student responses on assessment tasks where the response
involves more than selecting an answer from a prescribed list"
(Doran, Chan, & Tamir, 1998, p. 205). The rubrics provided
in EarthComm focus on four main criteria areas: concepts &
principles, terminology, additional research, and presentation.
Scores for each criteria range from 1-5. Teachers can develop
an overall score by combining scores for various criteria. The
general nature of the rubrics affords teachers the flexibility
of using them as guidelines for establishing more specific expectations.
All expectations should be communicated to students.
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Assessment Rubric
from Field Test Edition: Volcanoes and Your Community
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Meets the Standard of Excellence
5
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Significant information is presented about all of the following:
- Locations of volcanoes closest to your community
- Evidence of past or recent volcanic activity
- Volcanic hazards
- How volcanoes change the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere
and/or geosphere
All the information is accurate and appropriate.
The writing is clear and interesting.
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Approaches the Standard of Excellence
4
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Significant information is presented about most of the
following:
- Locations of volcanoes closest to your community
- Evidence of past or recent volcanic activity
- Volcanic hazards
- How volcanoes change the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere
and/or geosphere
All the information is accurate and appropriate.
The writing is clear and interesting.
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Meets an Acceptable Standard
3
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Significant information is presented about most of the
following:
- Locations of volcanoes closest to your community
- Evidence of past or recent volcanic activity
- Volcanic hazards
- How volcanoes change the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere
and/or geosphere
Most of the information is accurate and appropriate.
The writing is clear and interesting.
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Below Acceptable Standard
2
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Limited information is presented about the following:
- Locations of volcanoes closest to your community
- Evidence of past or recent volcanic activity
- Volcanic hazards
- How volcanoes change the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere
and/or geosphere
Most of the information is accurate and appropriate.
Generally, the writing does not hold the reader's attention.
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Basic Level:
1
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Limited information is presented about the following:
- Locations of volcanoes closest to your community
- Evidence of past or recent volcanic activity
- Volcanic hazards
- How volcanoes change the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere
and/or geosphere
Little of the information is accurate and appropriate.
The writing is difficult to follow.
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In keeping with the discussion of assessment in the National
Science Education Standards (NSES), care must be taken in developing
the specific expectations for each chapter. Four issues are of
particular importance in that they may present somewhat new considerations
for teachers and students:
Integrative Thinking-The National Science Education
Standards (NSES) state: "Assessments must be consistent with
the decisions they are designed to inform." This means that
as a prerequisite to establishing expectations, teachers should
consider the use of assessment information. In EarthComm, students
must be able to articulate the connection between Earth science
concepts and their own community. This means that they have to
integrate traditional Earth science content with knowledge of
their surroundings. It is likely that this kind of integration
will be new to students, and that they will require some practice
at accomplishing it. Assessment in one chapter can inform how
the next chapter is approached so that the ability to apply Earth
science concepts to local situations is enhanced on an ongoing
basis.
Importance- An explicit focus of NSES is to promote
a shift to deeper instruction on a smaller set of core science
concepts and principles. Assessment can support or undermine that
intent. It can support it by raising the priority of in-depth
treatment of concepts, such as students evaluating the relevance
of core concepts to their communities. Assessment can undermine
a deep treatment of concepts by encouraging students to parrot
back large bodies of knowledge-level facts that are not related
to any specific context in particular. In short, by focusing on
a few concepts and principles, deemed to be of particularly fundamental
importance, assessment can help to overcome a bias toward superficial
learning. For example, assessment of terminology that emphasizes
deeper understanding of science is that which focuses on the use
of terminology as a tool for communicating important ideas. Knowledge
of terminology is not an end in itself. Teachers must be watchful
that the focus remains on terminology in use, rather than on rote
recall of definitions. This is an area that some students will
find unusual if their prior science instruction has led them to
rely largely on memorization skills for success.
Flexibility-Students differ in many ways. Assessment
that calls on students to give thoughtful responses must allow
for those differences. Some students will find the open-ended
character of the EarthComm chapter reports disquieting. They may
ask many questions to try to find out exactly what the finished
product should look like. Teachers will have to give a consistent
and repeated message to those students, expressed in many different
ways, that the ambiguity inherent in the open-ended character
of the assessments is an opportunity for students to show what
they know in a way that makes sense to them. This also allows
for the assessments to be adapted to students with differing abilities
and proficiencies.
Consistency-While the chapter reports are intended
to be flexible, they are also intended to be consistent with the
manner in which instruction happens, and the kinds of inferences
that are going to be made about students' learning on the basis
of them. The EarthComm design is such that students have the opportunity
to learn new material in a way that places it in context. Consistent
with that, the chapter reports also call for the new material
to be expressed in context. Traditional tests are less likely
to allow this kind of expression, and are more likely to be inconsistent
with the manner of teaching that EarthComm is designed to promote.
Likewise, in that EarthComm is meant to help students relate Earth
science to their community, teachers will be using the chapter
reports as the basis for inferences regarding the students' abilities
to do that. The design of the chapter reports is intended to facilitate
such inferences.
An assessment instrument can imply but not determine its own
best use. This means that EarthComm teachers can inadvertently
assess chapter reports in ways that work against integrative thinking,
a focus on important ideas, flexibility in approach, and consistency
between assessment and the inferences made from that assessment.
This is why it will be important to work through assessment issues
with workshop participants. This manual contains sample student
work that you can copy for participants to practice applying the
non-traditional assessment methods used in EarthComm.
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AGI's professional development programs for teachers are supported
by generous contributions from corporate contributors of the American Geosciences Institute Foundation, the American
Association of Petroleum Geologists Foundation, and ChevronTexaco.
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