Change Thinking for Global Science: Fostering and Evaluating Inquiry Thinking About the Ecological Impacts of Climate Change

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This project is developing learning progression-driven visualization technologies, curricular units, and assessments towards realizing empirical evidence about middle and high school students' complex thinking about ecological impacts of global climate change. During the lifetimes of current middle and high school students, it is likely that our planet will undergo more anthropogenic change than it has during all of human history to date. With a national interest in complex thinking for globally competitiveness, a sense of urgency exists to build a solid, research-based foundation about a new, interdisciplinary focus area within precollege science education - students' complex reasoning about the impact of global changes on ecosystem dynamics. Recognizing the need for systematic development of resources, this project builds from existing resources and utilizes a learning progression approach for the systematic design of coordinated curricular, tool and assessment products. Quasiexperimental research studies on matched and consecutive cohorts are conducted to document learning outcomes and trajectories. Cross-sectional investigations are used to determine information on the effectiveness of curricular programs on student achievement. Growth curve analysis is used to descriptively examine students' complex reasoning growth trajectories throughout curricular programs. This work provides dynamic, age-appropriate visualization and modeling tools, and associated curricular units and assessment instruments to serve as foundational, empirically based information on teaching and learning about the impacts of global climate change. This work also provides an empirical and theoretical basis for content and inquiry reasoning progressions that articulate critical concept development in science and that explain how learning development is consistent with theories of learning. Data from middle and high school students coordinated with longitudinal data from 4-6th grade students provides information on student growth trajectories and achievement outcomes that will contribute to an understanding of possible learning progressions-driven outcomes over multiple units and years. Research results will also provide insights into the character and dynamics of learning trajectories and the challenges that occur as content and reasoning knowledge develops.