Students Using Data to Answer Their Own Questions

- by Kathy Spicer

Kathy Spicer is an eighth grade science teacher at Silver Lake Middle School, Kingston MA. Kathy approached the complex concept of climate change by helping students use data to answer their own questions rather providing students with ready answers.

My journey into the EaSiE project began with enthusiasm and anticipation, but I had no idea what a true journey into a teaching transformation it would be. As I look back, I am struck with the realization that during 30 years of teaching I never truly looked at my role in teaching the way I do now after working in collaboration with the other teachers in the project. Professional development is too often a hit or miss experience where teachers walk away with ideas only to get drawn back into the old routine, never really adopting the practices to which they have been introduced. This was true of me as well until I became a part of this group. When asked what I taught, I would list the topics covered. Without even realizing it, I was looking at science topics as separate entities. The experience in this group made for a constantly evolving look at my curriculum. I was challenged by my peers to view my curriculum as a series of overlapping, interacting subsystems. We pushed and encouraged each other to find new and exciting ways to motivate our students. As we made our way through the topics we began to ask more and more questions and to see more and more connections. We were fortunate to have repeated opportunities to get back together to evaluate and improve our lessons and our approaches to delivering these lessons. We found it was impossible to do the topic of Earth as a system justice without digging deeper. What we experienced was soon mirrored in the students we taught.

So often, students approach earth science as a series of topics that stand alone. The overlapping ideals are neglected as they look at each strand independently. It is in looking at the parts and the relationships that I saw the students making real meaningful connections. We began the past school year with the Systems lesson. It was a deviation from the approach that many of the students had seen employed in the past. I was astounded particularly by the reaction of the students who usually hang back and let their peers do the work. The lesson involved a bicycle and the identification of the subsystems within that system. Because it was very hands on, several of my students who are talented in building and racing bikes were in their element. They quickly took on a role of leadership in identifying and explaining the interaction between parts and the subsystems present on the bicycle. Debates took place within groups as to whether or not the rider should be considered part of the system. It was a very student-centered lesson. They asked questions and pushed each other to see relationships. From the initial lesson came a fountain of ideas! The students brainstormed and created charts listing as many systems as they could. The lists involved all topics of science. The formally isolated themes began to overlap in a way that made the knowledge relevant. Students began to see that nothing exists on its own and that everything impacts what is around it. As the year went on, input, output, and feedback became terms that the students were using more comfortably. Weather and climate were naturally occurring topics as hurricane season set in. The students were asked to look at the systems that contributed to the storms. They began looking for connections instead of memorizing facts. Their questioning strategies were developing as they shifted their way of thinking. Students began looking at the parts of the whole without needing to be reminded. An understanding that weather was an interaction between many topics now emerged. Students were moving away from seeing things in isolation and therefore a deeper level of understanding was being reached. The students were able to verbalize how global and regional climates affect the local climates by following the events leading up to the storms. Heat energy, temperature, and precipitation became more than vocabulary words. They were subsystems identified by real time data.

As the year progressed we began to look at the ocean as an interaction of systems. Students adopted buoys and downloaded, analyzed, and graphed the data collected by the buoys. The buoys became very personal to the students. There was concern when buoys went down and elation when the repairs were made. Talk about real science! Students demonstrated an understanding of the relationship between temperature, salinity, and wave height and were able to discuss possible reasons for the data. The graphs became representations of the stories their buoys told. Along the way the students made discoveries about misconceptions that they and some of their family members held. One student came into class after discussing our lesson at dinner the previous night. He was talking about his buoy off the coast of Maine and its relationship to those in the Gulf of Maine off the coast of his southern Massachusetts town. His mother corrected him stating that he must have misunderstood the map. Massachusetts was not part of the Gulf of Maine. My student returned to class the next day and asked for clarification. He was very proud of himself when he realized that he was, in fact, correct. It led to a discussion about what a gulf is and a look at other gulfs and the land area they encompass. Real questions with real answers!

After many years of teaching students the components of climate systems, I was thrilled to see that in teaching with a true systems approach, the sun, atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and cryosphere were no longer seen simply as information to be regurgitated. Students began to recognize the balance of energy released by these systems. Climate change was now looked at through educated eyes. Students asked me if I believed that global warming was real. I told them that I thought it was more important for them to answer that question themselves. What did they think? I was asked of course, why I always answer their questions with a question. Surprisingly, they started talking about what they knew so far about the systems of the earth. They talked about the historical data they had looked at and how things were happening at a much faster rate than had been recorded in the past. The classes came to the conclusion that global warming was, in fact, true. I told them that, based on the evidence, I would have to agree. There was obvious satisfaction that we had come to the same conclusion. Because of the effort they put in to connect the dots, I feel that the lesson has an enduring element that would not have been there had I just told them my feelings. The students were taking ownership of their learning.

Since the students demonstrated excitement in adopting the buoys, we took adoption to the next level. Students chose NOAA tagged animals to track online. The students logged the data being sent back by satellite and journaled about why they thought the animals travelled in the routes they did. The interest in the animals spurred the students to look at the systems in the ocean that were impacting the behavior of the animals. The deeper they went in questioning, the more questions arose. Upwelling became a concern for the students following the Sooty Shearwater across the Pacific Ocean. The “garbage patch” was a new and very real danger as a result of human interaction with that part of the ocean. They wanted to know what was special about that area that created the unique problems there. That led to investigating information about the ocean floor and the interaction of water temperature and currents. Again, students were generating questions and searching for answers without being force fed. The interest was genuine and the motivation came from within. It was such an eye-opening experience for me. What would seem so obvious had escaped me for so long. By looking at all areas as parts of the whole, the learning was natural and logical. We learn letters as parts of words….words as parts of sentences….sentences as parts of paragraphs and yet, in science we tend to teach in isolation. It is such an artificial way to learn. It gave me the opportunity to go back to being the student to really take notice of the irony of how our curriculum is set up and how I have approached that curriculum. By changing the direction of my questions to looking at how smaller components interact with larger components of a system, as opposed to looking at the parts of systems individually, a deeper understanding is being reached by the students.

As the members of the EaSiE project designed and tried out the lessons we were creating, we came to very similar conclusions about the strengths and challenges of our students. Although most students could create graphs, many of them had difficulty choosing the graph style that was appropriate for the information they had collected. Bar graphs were the hand-down favorite of all students when we began to look at collecting real time data. As the students began to tell their stories, it became clearer that line graphs were necessary to tell the stories over time. Increments of measurement were the other area of difficulty. The students struggled with dividing their information in a meaningful way. As they created graphs and changed the increments, they were able to see that graphs can be misleading if the information is represented in different ways. After working their way through these issues, they were much better prepared to look at misleading graphs and to identify why the graphs were misleading. There was no shortage of climate data that could challenge their ability to question the motivation of some graph layouts. They began to be discriminating scientists. The students starting seeing if certain sections of a graph were singled out, a very different conclusion could be reached about the data than if data representing longer or shorter periods of time were examined.

My students benefitted in other ways as well from this project. To be a real scientist, one needs real scientific instruments. My scientists became familiar with secchi discs, anemometers, Galileo thermometers, and gauges of many types. They watched podcasts on how buoys work and what scientists do on a daily basis. Carbon footprints were calculated. Neighborhoods and countries were explored on Google Earth. This was real science being taught to real children. I feel that I took my students on my journey with me, a journey through the systems of Earth, alongside some of the finest educators with whom I have ever had the pleasure of working.