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Laura Rosales-Lagarde_Implementation Story.docx(DOCX | 187 KB)
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- Climate Change Module
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Description
Scientists agree that the climate is changing and that human activities are a primary cause for this change through increased emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. There have been times in Earth's past that temperature and CO2 concentrations have been much higher than they currently are, so it is not just the actual temperature that is of concern to scientists, but the fact that the rate of change of temperature is unprecedented in the geologic record. We do not know how various factors will respond to such a rapid rate of change, and thus we anticipate that many species will not be able to adapt, leading to widespread extinction. In this module, students will explore how climate is changing from the recent record. They will then compare current patterns to pre-historic rates of change calculated from ice-core data and use their results to support whether or not human activity is likely to have influenced current climate change.
Project EDDIE Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry & Exploration) is a community effort aimed at developing teaching resources and instructors that address quantitative reasoning and scientific concepts using open inquiry of publicly available data. Project EDDIE modules are designed with an A-B-C structure to make them flexible and adaptable to a range of student levels and course structures.
Notes
[From the implementation file document]
My course is meteorology/climatology for environmental & resource science, education and non-science majors. Usually this class is taught as a lecture format but I incorporate daily meteorological data and use project-base as a way to assess students learning. This time I also used ungrading and weekly reflections to encourage students to focus on their learning instead of the grades. The climate change module was intended to get students to use data to create a graph to visualize the data, identify relationships and answer questions using this data. This module was meant to support a semester long Climate Change Resilience project. The module was partially effective on achieving the objectives set with students who have used excel in the past but students who have not used excel before found it too difficult to complete the assignment, starting from downloading the data. This difficulty was compounded by the fact that students were developing their final project about climate change resilience, not allowing them to focus on the Climate Change module.
Next time I teach the Meteorology/Climatology class I plan to include this module earlier in the semester with a previous excel based assignment for us to complete together as a class, posting in google slides the graphs created to better track the different levels of the students using excel. Then use this knowledge to pair advanced and beginner students on how to complete Activities A & B. I will also have the excel file with the data to assure this step does not become an obstacle for the completion of the assignment. Then wrap up and reflect together as a class on what we learned about this module before starting the Climate Change Resilience project.
In the future implementation of this module I am collaborating to modify with math professors we will be partitioning the temperature and carbon dioxide data in 30 years intervals and have the students investigate the global historical background for that time lapse. Students will then plot the complete data. This will allow students to ponder the difference in rates at small and longer intervals, as well as to make the project unique between different iterations. Activity C can be used as a different project on its own.
From this implementation, Students main takeaway was the capability to visualize how a parameter changes and how it relates to another. Particularly having them select their own data to identify rates of warming and rates in the increase of carbon dioxide gave them the freedom to explore and make the data their own. In the same way having their own data and the questions made them better ponder how does a glacial and an interglacial period looks like. Advanced students struggled with the use of formulas to calculate the temperature from isotopic data in Activity C. Beginner students struggle downloading the data and using excel.
First implementation of the module went OK, but could have been better. I was hoping to create my own video to guide students to complete the assignment but I ran out of time so I just posted videos created by previous EDDIE instructors.
[More details on the implementation are included in the Laura Rosales-Lagarde Implementation word file].
Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
- Rosales Lagarde, L. (2022). Climate Change Module (Project EDDIE). QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/653X-PW05