General Education Course Development for Earth System Science and Global Change

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Undergraduate science education for both students majoring in science and engineering, and those students who are non-science majors must evolve to bring students in contact with the tools needed to efficiently grasp critical and emerging scientific issues. In 1991, the University of Arizona started a two-semester sequence "Introduction to Global Change" to teach non-science majors about the Earth system. The course teaches basic scientific principles in the context of global problems and challenges facing scientists, policy makers and citizens alike. The current project further develops this general-science course sequence in order to more fully integrate information technologies into the courses, and to explicitly design materials that promote collaborative learning and critical thinking skills through several different instructional strategies. PIs are working with an independent, professional evaluator to develop and implement 10 modules for the two-course sequence. A module is a course unit focusing on a single topic, and involves laboratory sections, lectures, homework, discussions or other resources. The focus of their efforts is on: i) developing computer-based laboratory exercises as the centerpieces of the modules, ii) implementing the computer-based tools with the classes, iii) assembling and preparing the additional material needed to complete each module (e.g. visual aids, study questions, background material, references), and iv) documenting each module in a workbook for the classes. The workbook, including documentation of software and data, will be made available to faculty at other colleges and universities interested in developing similar global-change courses. An important aspect of this project is the explicit assessment of the effectiveness of different instructional strategies on students of different gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. This multidisciplinary teaching effort is part of the University of Arizona's global-change resea rch program.