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Use the Estuaries 101 Curriculum to Build Data and Estuarine Literacy
This year, along the West Coast of the United States, the news has been dominated by stories of deadly flash floods and record days with rainfall. A high school science teacher in Boyes Hot Springs, California has her students’ measure rainfall once a week during science class. Each year they graph these numbers, but several times this year the rain gauge has filled before they checked it. A skeptical teen asked, “Is it raining more than usual?” Last year, Ms. Feichert would have been unable to help the students answer their own question because their weekly data set has missing data point and quality concerns. This year, Ms. Feichert was ready! Earlier in the year, she participated in a training at the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve where she learned to use the Estuaries 101 Curriculum, built her own confidence in using data and encouraging student-driven inquiry in the classroom, and taught her where to find the data that would answer the question without overwhelming her students.
After working through a couple of Estuaries 101 Curriculum activities on human and ocean influences on rainfall patterns that she downloaded and printed, Ms. Feichert students’ honed the data analysis skills necessary to tackle their question. Ms. Feichert’s school is in a low-income community; they don’t have a fast internet connection, so they haven’t used an on-line curriculum before. Ms. Feichert, though, knows that the estuaries.gov website was designed with her students, and their computers, in mind. She teams up with their technology specialist, and directs them to the estuaries.gov website. From there, the students could compare average rainfall values over the course of one year (or a day, a week, or a month) to those from previous years. They could do the same analysis at 5 sites on the West Coast. After downloading, graphing, and interpreting the data, the students concluded that it rained much more in January than in an average January, but that the yearly average rainfall was not abnormal. After answering their original question, several of the students explored how the rainfall patterns affected salinity in the estuary in an attempt to decide whether this was a good year to take the fishing trip they have been planning.
Like the teacher in this hypothetical example, educators who use the Estuaries 101 Curriculum and accompanying data will have the capability for their students to perform complex marine science investigations to solve exciting, applied questions. In addition to the weather data, training in Estuaries 101 will give these teachers access to data from 104 water quality monitoring stations located in estuaries across the nation that each generate 96 data points every day of the year - enough data to answer many rounds of questions! These questions may build from school-based water quality or weather monitoring programs that collect the same type of data as SWMP, or from past experiences with estuaries, perhaps testing water quality on a school field trip. Data exploration encourages keen insight into these problem that will allow students to move from a general disassociated concepts like, ‘oceans are important to human civilization’ to an empowered understanding that ‘the amount of rainfall we get, and therefore whether my house floods or not, depends on the circulation patterns in the ocean’.
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Last Updated on: 07-13-2008
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