Draft: Environmental Literacy Blueprint

September, 2006

Charles W. Anderson, Hasan Abdel-Kareem, Jing Chen, In-Young Cho, Beth Covitt, Jim Gallagher, Kristin Gunckel, Lindsey Mohan Hawkins, Hui Jin, Ajay Sharma, Blakely Tsurusaki, Chris Wilson, Josie Zesaguli

Michigan State University

Phil Piety

University of Michigan


Contents

Abstract: Learning Progressions in Environmental Literacy 4

Background: The Science Curriculum and Environmentally Responsible Citizenship 6

Interdisciplinary Scientific Research on Coupled Human and Natural Systems 7

Responsible Citizenship and Environmental Science Literacy 7

Theoretical Framework: Key Practices of Environmental Science Literacy 10

General Framework 10

Knowledge and practice in environmental science literacy 10

Practices, principles, and processes in systems in the framework 12

1. Inquiry: Learning from experience 14

2. Scientific Accounts: Learning and Applying Authoritative Scientific Knowledge 14

3. Using scientific reasoning for responsible citizenship: Reconciling experience, authority, and values 15

General Trends in a Learning Progression for Environmental Science Literacy 16

Elementary: Local experience and understanding of individual systems at a human scale 17

Middle school: Using scientific models to explain and connect systems 18

High school: Integrated understanding of local environmental systems in context 19

Concluding Thoughts 21

References 21

Appendix A: Learning Progression Notes for Inquiry 24

Upper Anchor: Principles, Processes in Systems, and Learning Performances 24

Lower Anchor: Informal Learning from Experience 24

Possible Progress Variables 24

Assessments 24

Teaching Ideas 24

Appendix B: Learning Progression Notes for Carbon 25

Upper Anchor: Principles, Processes in Systems, and Learning Performances 25

Lower Anchor: Informal Reasoning about Plants, Animals, Combustion 26

Possible Progress Variables 26

Assessments 26

Teaching Ideas 26

Appendix C: Learning Progression Notes for Energy 27

Upper Anchor: Principles, Processes in Systems, and Learning Performances 27

Lower Anchor: Informal Reasoning about Energy and Causes of Processes 30

Possible Progress Variables 30

Assessments 31

Teaching Ideas 31

References 31

Appendix D: Learning Progression Notes for Water 33

Upper Anchor: Principles, Processes in Systems, and Learning Performances 33

Lower Anchor: Informal Reasoning about Water in Environmental Systems 39

Possible Progress Variables 39

Assessments 39

Teaching Ideas 40

Appendix E: Learning Progression Notes for Diversity 41

Upper Anchor: Principles, Processes in Systems, and Learning Performances 41

Lower Anchor: Informal Reasoning about Structure-function Relationships, Life Cycles, and Diversity 41

Possible Progress Variables 42

Assessments 42

Teaching Ideas 43

References 43

Appendix F: Learning Progression Notes for Citizenship 44

Upper Anchor: Principles, Processes in Systems, and Learning Performances 44

Lower Anchor: Informal Decision Making 44

Possible Progress Variables 45

Assessments 45

Teaching Ideas 45

Abstract: Learning Progressions in Environmental Literacy

This blueprint outlines a blueprint for a program of research and development for a K-12 curriculum focusing on environmental science literacy—the capacity to understand and participate in evidence-based discussions of the effects of human actions on environmental systems. Environmental science literate high school graduates should be able to engage in two practices that are essential for environmentally responsible citizenship. They should be able to understand and evaluate experts’ arguments about environmental issues, and they should be able to decide on policies and personal actions that are consistent with their environmental values.

Environmental science literacy requires understanding of many aspects of science, including those addressed in this session: Chemical and physical change, carbon cycling, diversity and evolution by natural selection, and connecting human actions with environmental systems. These phenomena are currently addressed in many state and national standards documents and in school curricula, but typically they are addressed in disconnected ways—in different courses or in different units in the same course. We argue that they can fit together as a coherent conceptual domain that all of our citizens need to understand. In particular, understanding in all of these domains requires applying fundamental principles to processes in coupled human and natural systems.

Our framework includes three components:

  1. Practices. Environmental science literacy includes three key practices:
  2. Inquiry: learning from experience, developing and evaluating arguments from evidence
  3. Scientific accounts: understanding and producing model-based accounts of environmental systems; using scientific accounts to explain and predict observations
  4. Citizenship: using scientific reasoning for responsible citizenship
  5. Principles applied to processes in systems. Each practice involves applying fundamental principles to processes in coupled human and natural systems.
  6. Principles. Key categories of principles include:
  7. Inquiry principles, including principles for acquiring data, finding patterns in data, and critiquing and evaluating investigations
  8. Structure of systems, including atomic-molecular, microscopic, macroscopic, and large-scale structures
  9. Constraints on processes, including principles for tracing matter, energy, and information through processes in systems.
  10. Change over time, including principles for understanding multiple causation, feedback loops, and evolutionary changes in populations
  11. Citizenship principles, including principles for evaluating conflicting claims and deciding on responsible courses of action.
  12. Processes in systems. Key systems and processes include:
  13. Earth systems, including the earth, atmosphere, and water.
  14. Living systems, including cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems.
  15. Engineered systems, including the systems that provide human populations with food, energy, water, and transportation.
  16. Learning progressions. We seek to develop research-based learning progressions that describe how K-12 students could come to master the practices of environmental literacy. Learning progressions are built around (a) an upper anchor: the detailed practices that we hope high school graduates will master, (b) a lower anchor: what we learn from empirical research about the practices and understandings of children in elementary school, and (c) progress variables that can be used to describe a series of reasonable steps from the lower to the upper anchor. We organize these learning progressions around three strands:
  17. Carbon. The role of carbon compounds in earth, living, and engineered systems, including carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, energy flow and carbon cycling in ecosystems, and fossil fuels in human energy and transportation systems
  18. Water. The role of water and substances carried by water in earth, living, and engineered systems, including the atmosphere, surface water and ice, ground water, human water systems, and water in living systems.
  19. Diversity. The diversity of living and engineered systems, including genetics and life cycles of individual organisms, evolutionary changes in populations, diversity in natural ecosystems and in human systems that produce food, fiber, and wood.

Working groups consisting of university-based researchers and K-12 teachers are focusing on each strand, reviewing relevant literature, developing assessments that reveal students’ reasoning about the topic, and administering the assessments in the teachers’ classrooms. Our goal is to produce three kinds of products:

  1. Learning progressions as described above: research-based accounts of how students enter school thinking about environmental systems, and of the progress variables and learning processes that could lead to the development of environmentally literate practices and understandings.
  2. Assessment resources that can be used for research and to guide teachers’ practice as they assess students’ progress toward environmental literacy.
  3. Teaching resources that teachers can use to help students master the practices and understandings of environmental science literacy in ways appropriate for the students’ ages and cultures.

Products developed to date can be found on our website: http://edr1.educ.msu.edu/EnvironmentalLit/index.htm.

Background: The Science Curriculum and Environmentally Responsible Citizenship

The last decade has seen a broad consensus in American science education around a program of standards-based reform. We have generally supported efforts to focus the curriculum on the largely overlapping content of the National Science Education Standards and Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993; NRC, 1996). While this program still enjoys broad support, there are signs that that support is beginning to erode. Two lines of criticism have emerged, urging that the curriculum defined by the standards be changed in different directions.

The first line of criticism could be labeled a traditionalist critique. These critics are perhaps best exemplified the publications of the Fordham Institute and its director, Chester Finn (e.g., Gross, 2005a, 2005b). These critics claim that the current national standards, as well as state standards and assessments based on them, lack sufficient rigorous science content. They advocate a program of reform based on traditional disciplinary content. Although these critics have relatively little support in the science education community, they have a clear agenda that has attracted considerable attention among scientists and politicians.

The second line of criticism could be labeled a science education research critique. These critics focus on a number of limitations that are likely to keep the program of standards-based reform from achieving its ambitious goals (e.g., AAAS Project 2061, 2003; Anderson, 2004). Those concerns include the following:

·  The reform agenda is more ambitious than our current resources and infrastructure can support.

·  There are conceptual problems with the way standards conceive of relationships among knowledge, language, practice, and meta-level understandings about the nature of science.

·  The standards advocate strategies that may not reduce achievement gaps among different groups of students.

·  There are too many standards, more than students can learn with understanding in the time we have to teach science.

·  The current standards are based on science content as of the early 1990’s, so there is a need to reconsider which science content is most current and most important.

·  The current standards do not take full advantage of recent research on science teaching and learning.

While these concerns are widespread in the science education community, they have not led to clearly defined agendas that have wide support among science educators. This session is part of an effort to promote discussion that could lead toward such an agenda.

This paper set reports results from a long-term program of research that builds on developments in the natural sciences, where interdisciplinary research on coupled human and natural systems has become increasingly important. These changes in the natural science lead us to advocate changes in the science curriculum that refocus the curriculum on environmental literacy and responsible citizenship. Finally, our approach is influenced by developments in educational research, where learning progressions are emerging as a strategy for synthesizing research on science learning and applying that research to policy and practice.

Interdisciplinary Scientific Research on Coupled Human and Natural Systems

In the natural sciences, traditionally separate fields are increasingly integrated. For example, modern ecology has focused on linked human and natural systems (see, for example, AC-ERE, 2003). Human populations survive by altering natural ecosystems and the processes in them, taking materials we need out of those systems and putting our wastes back into them. Thus ecological research has focused increasingly on environmental systems that have been substantially altered by humans, such as farms and cities, as well as the supply chains and waste disposal chains that connect human economic and technological systems with both relatively pristine and altered ecosystems.

These changes in the natural sciences are driven in part by increasing awareness among scientists of how human populations are changing local and global environments. For example, the “carbon cycle” is no longer a cycle, on either local or global scales; most environmental systems—especially those altered by humans—are net producers or net consumers of organic carbon. Similarly, humans have altered the global system so that there is now a net flow of carbon from forests and fossil fuels to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Thus previous beliefs in the “balance of nature” and the basic stability of earth systems have been replaced by an understanding of environmental systems as dynamic in nature and changing in ways that we need to understand (see, for example, Weart, 2003).

It is now generally accepted that human populations and the technological systems that support us have grown to the point where we are fundamentally altering the natural environmental systems that sustain all life on Earth. Human influences are changing environmental systems in new ways, at unprecedented rates, and with potentially grievous consequences to humans and other life forms. Evidence of the scale of human effects on environmental systems abounds:

·  Global climate change is happening; average carbon dioxide levels have risen by almost 20% in the last 40 years. This process will have inevitable (though not completely understood) consequences for sea levels, frequency and severity of storms, natural ecosystems, and human agriculture (Keeling and Whorf, 2005).

·  Around 50% of net photosynthetic output of terrestrial ecosystems is now appropriated for human use (Vitousek, Ehrlich, Ehrlich, & Pamela Matson, 1986).

·  Species are becoming extinct at 1000 times the long-term average rate (Wilson, 2001).

These developments in environmental science research have implications for all of us. The natural environment cannot continue to support human societies in their present organization and technologies. As we continue to live beyond the resources means that ecosystems can provide, the consequences of this environmental deficit will fall inequitably across the people on this globe. Those who live in environmentally marginal areas, in impoverished economies, and in politically unstable countries will suffer first and most.

Responsible Citizenship and Environmental Science Literacy

A critical function of universal education is to prepare students for multiple roles that we play as citizens - as learners, consumers, voters, workers, volunteers, and advocates. The ways that we carry out our roles as citizens affect our impact, as individuals and as a society, on the Earth’s environmental systems. Our choices as consumers, voters, and advocates, for example, may impact our future access to ecosystem services such as clean air, clean water, food, and a climate appropriate for human habitation.

Here are some key roles and the ways that these roles affect coupled human and natural systems.

·  Learners. We are learners throughout our lives. After finishing school, what we learn depends in large measure on what we choose to pay attention to, in the media, in our personal experience, and in more formal educational settings. Our choices about what we learn and how affect our ability to make use of evidence about environmental systems in all of our actions as citizens.

·  Consumers. We are also consumers throughout our lives, making decisions about our lifestyles and about the goods and services that we use. The impacts of the decisions we make as individual consumers are small. The cumulative impact of many individual consumer decisions, though, is huge. The human systems with the greatest environmental impact have largely been constructed to satisfy consumer demand.[1]