Incorporating Data into Undergraduate Courses Jen Wenner UW-Oshkosh Preparing for an Academic Career in Geosciences Workshop: Summer 2015

 Do you use data? How?  What kinds of data do you use?  Why incorporate data into your courses?  Realistic representation of geosciences  Prepare them for the “future”  Make them quantitatively literate.quantitatively literate

Data sets are flexible  Data and assignments can be tailored to reach a broad range of student groups K-12Graduate courses  Can be used in one class/lab session or throughout an entire course

Data sets are cost-effective  Majority of online sources are now free  Simple, low-cost field and lab work Data sets are concept-effective  Allow for compare/contrast work at a range of spatial & temporal scales  Single or multi-concept patterns

Data sets are engaging  Allow students the opportunity to practice science and promote active learning Data sets are real  Require students to grapple with issues of complexity, uncertainty, and outliers

Ocean Circulation Classic textbook Pacific high latitude Atlantic low latitude gov/epic/ewb/ Profiles

Data sets are diverse in topic, scope, and format  Data from new research  Field work and/or lab work in your course  A genuine research experiment  Data from published literature  Journal articles, government documents, NGO reports  Recreate/rediscover research results and test hypotheses

Data sets are diverse in topic, scope, and format  Online datasets  Site specific, regional, and global databases  “Mine” the site for data that can help you teach particular concepts and/or skills

Sample activities Introductory + upper level courses

Data sets are not stand alone resources  Design how you’ll use data  Identify clear student learning outcomes regarding content, concepts, and/or skills  What steps in the process are most important for your students to practice? (collection and reduction vs. analysis and reporting)  How will you address uncertainty, outliers, etc.?

Data sets are not foolproof  Logistics  Work through all steps of the process ahead of time  Envision and create “Plan B” Evaluation/assessment  Did the use of data achieve some student learning goal? How will you know?

 Do you use data? How?  What kinds of data do you use?  What would you like students to be able to do?  What resources do you have for supporting students for learning with and using data?  Where can you get high quality data?

Exploration activity  Choose a course you would like to teach  Identify student learning outcomes that result from working with the data  Determine the duration of time needed to complete the activity  Identify a website with datasets that could be used in the course –OR- identify new datasets that the students can generate –OR- find an existing activity you can use on the SERC website