Learning Progressions for Environmental Science Literacy Charles W. (Andy) Anderson Presentation to the Conceptual Framework for New Science Education Standards, Committee Meeting 2 National Research Council Board on Science Education March 4, 2010 I appreciate very much the opportunity to make this presentation. It’s about issues that I care about a lot.

Thanks for the Opportunity to Do This Research This research is supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation: Developing a Research-based Learning Progression for the Role of Carbon in Environmental Systems (REC 0529636), the Center for Curriculum Materials in Science (ESI-0227557), Learning Progression on Carbon-Transforming Processes in Socio-Ecological Systems (NSF 0815993), and Targeted Partnership: Culturally Relevant Ecology, Learning Progressions and Environmental Literacy (NSF-0832173). Additional support comes from the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the United States Department of Energy. I’ll start by thanking NSF for the opportunity to do this work over the years. I’ve accumulated way more that I would like to say than I can say in 15 minutes, so I’ll try to talk fast.

Questions to Address 1) How did you identify your big ideas? That is, how did you decide what ideas to focus on? 2) How are you treating the relationship between content and practice? 3) What are the implications of learning progressions for writing standards? Here are the 3 questions that Brian, Deb, and Heidi asked me to address. SLIDE I’ll talk briefly about the first 2, then spend a little more time on the third My paper includes more extensive responses to all 3 questions.

Question 1 How did you identify your big ideas? That is, how did you decide what ideas to focus on? We need standards that are compact, coherent, and incomplete We need to focus on social utility: Preparing all students for roles as citizens Environmental science literacy as my focus With respect to the first question, I would like to make 3 points. SLIDE

Defining Environmental Science Literacy The required science curriculum should prepare students for roles that all citizens play Private roles: learner, consumer, worker Public roles: voter, advocate Key characteristics of informed citizenship Ability to choose actions consistent with our values Ability to understand and evaluate arguments from evidence We are developing learning progressions in three strands Carbon (main focus for today) Water Biodiversity Here’s how we define environmental science literacy. SLIDE

Question 2 How are you treating the relationship between content and practice? Content: Students need to be able to “see themselves in the loop diagram.” Practices of environmental science literacy: investigating, accounts, and deciding Using observations, patterns, and models to connect content and practice That leads us to Question 2: How do we think about content, practice, and the relationship between the two? SLIDE

Goal or Upper Anchor for Content: The Carbon “Loop Diagram” Carbon-transforming processes “loop diagram” (Mohan, et al., 2009) Here’s one version of the content students need to know. This is what we call the Loop Diagram—the upper anchor of our carbon learning progression. See my paper for more details. Note that the right-hand box has the environmental carbon cycle--carbon-transforming processes that generate, transform, and oxidize organic carbon. But because we are appropriating organic carbon for our uses and sending back CO2—the arrows to and from the human systems box—these processes are not in balance, leading to increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. Students need to learn the relationships among these processes and “see themselves in the loop diagram.”

Practices of Environmentally Literate Citizens Discourses: Communities of practice, identities, values, funds of knowledge Explaining and Predicting (Accounts) What is happening in this situation? What are the likely consequences of different courses of action? Investigating (Inquiry) What is the problem? Who do I trust? What’s the evidence? Deciding What will I do? Now our approach to practices. Our studies of how students at different levels of sophistication make environmental decisions have led us to identify 3 key practices: Investigating, accounts, and deciding. Inquiry and accounts—the yellow boxes—are particularly important to us as science educators.

Connecting Knowledge and Practice Inquiry: Learning from data Accounts: Using models And here’s a point about the key scientific practices, inquiry and accounts. Both involve making connections among different kinds of scientific knowledge claims: observations, patterns, and models.

Three Points about Content and Practice There is substantial overlap between our practices of environmental science literacy and other lists of practices: Strands of scientific proficiency in Taking Science to School Scientific practices in 2009 NAEP Framework The key practices of accounts (explaining and predicting) and inquiry are inseparable from content knowledge and from one another Distinctions among types of knowledge claims—observations, patterns, and models—are essential for defining practices In summary, here are 3 points I would like to make about the second question. SLIDE

Question 3 What are the implications of learning progressions for writing standards? Implications of the general nature of learning progressions Conceptual and empirical validation Telling a developmental story of learning Findings of our research: Key transitions that students need to make Discourse: Force-dynamic to scientific Accounts: Explaining and predicting socio-ecological processes at multiple scales Inquiry: Standards for first-hand and second-hand inquiry So now racing along to the third question: What are the implications of learning progressions for writing standards? Can answer that question at 2 levels, one having to do with the general nature of learning progression research, the other with findings from our own research.

Empirical Validation of Learning Progressions: An Iterative Process Framework and assessments are developed concurrently Develop initial framework Develop assessments (e.g. written tests, interviews) and/or teaching experiments based on the framework Use data from assessments and teaching experiments to revise framework Develop new assessments…. Key question for you: When is this process “finished enough?” We feel pretty confident about carbon, less so about water and biodiversity First general point: Learning progressions are empirically validated. Only way to do this is through an iterative process in which results from assessments lead to revisions in the framework as well as the other way around. A key question for your group: When is this process “finished” enough for you to use the results?

Another General Point: Different “Stories” of Learning Traditional standards: Accumulation of knowledge Standards at all levels are scientifically correct facts and skills Students make progress by learning more facts and more complicated skills Learning progressions: Succession in “conceptual ecologies” Interconnected and mutually supporting ideas and practices at all levels Non-canonical ideas and practices can be both useful and important developmental steps Focus is on sequence of learning rather than age of students Here’s a second general point When we develop learning progressions, we are also trying to tell a different kind of story SLIDE

Findings from Our Research: Discourse, Accounts, and Inquiry Based on work with fourth grade through college students Applicable more generally than just to carbon cycle Now specific findings from our research. We DO have some specific results that I think are well enough validated for you to consider, including some that have implications for topics beyond the carbon cycle. I will talk about these under the general headings of: --discourse—the blue background of this figure --accounts and inquiry—the yellow practices again

Findings about Learning Scientific Discourse Force-dynamic to scientific discourse: learning a fundamentally different way to interpret events in the material world Conceptual transition: from fungible “forces” to enduring entities Epistemological transition: from facts about the world to observations, patterns, and models I think that the most important results of our research to date involve the fundamental differences between the world view embedded in the grammar and semantics of ordinary English and scientific ways of construing the systems and processes of the world. We call this the transition from force-dynamic to scientific discourse, and it has both conceptual and epistemological dimensions.

Contrasts between Force-dynamic and Scientific Discourse Force-dynamic discourse: Actors (e.g., animals, plants, machines) make thing happen with the help of enablers (“needs”) by exerting “forces” Distinctions among types of enablers and forces are fluid Actors endure over time, but not the enablers and forces Scientific discourse: Systems are composed of enduring entities (e.g., matter, energy) which change according to laws or principles (e.g., conservation laws) Clear distinctions among entities Entities endure over time while systems change Here are some key contrasts between force-dynamic and scientific discourse SLIDE I had to drop my examples from this presentation, but I think that this is SO interesting. Feel free to ask me about it.

Findings about Accounts: Learning about Matter, Energy, and Scale Level 1: Explanations and predictions are based on ideas about actors and enablers at macroscopic scale Levels 2 and 3: Current: students learn disconnected facts about systems at smaller (microscopic, atomic molecular) and larger (landscape, global) scales Preferred: students expand awareness to smaller and larger scales in principled ways (focus of our teaching experiments) Level 4: Connected accounts across scales Our work on accounts is the best developed, and also generalizes beyond the carbon cycle. We also see differences in the ways that students at different levels use ideas about matter, energy, and scale when they explain carbon-transforming processes. SLIDE

Macroscopic Scale: Grouping and Explaining Carbon-transforming Processes Black: Linking processes that students at all levels can tell us about Red: Lower anchor accounts based on informal discourse Green: Upper anchor accounts based on scientific models This slide has another table from my paper. We ask student of all ages about the linking processes in black, but what they NOTICE and interpret can be entirely different. Students relying on informal reasoning notice that plant growth, animal growth, and animal movement all involve living things using their powers to achieve results—quite different from decay and combustion. Scientific accounts of changes in materials focus on quite different patterns of change and therefore group the processes differently—according to how they transform carbon compounds.

Atomic Molecular Scale: Facts vs. Model-based Reasoning High school students learn atomic-molecular facts, such as the equation for cellular respiration. They have a great deal of trouble using those facts as working models: What happens to the atoms in a person’s fat when he loses weight? (They are burned for energy.) How do trees grow? (photosynthesis) Where does the mass of trees come from? (water and soil nutrients) We see most high school students acquiring the vocabulary of atoms and molecules, but few actually using atomic-molecular models to explain carbon transforming processes.

Large-scale Systems: Scientific Reasoning about the Carbon Cycle Combustion, cellular respiration Photosynthesis Matter: CO2, H2O, and minerals Matter: Organic matter & O2 Biosynthesis, digestion, food webs, fossil fuel formation Movement of CO2, H2O, and minerals Energy: Sunlight Energy: Chemical potential energy Energy: Work & heat We see similar patterns when we move up to large-scale systems. Here’s a standard scientific account of the carbon cycle: Matter cycles, (green) energy flows. (red) (Note: Matter cycling involves carbon moving from the atmosphere to organic materials and back again. Chemical potential energy is a key to tracing energy flow. 3. involves connecting macroscopic or atomic molecular and large scale processes)

Informal Reasoning about the Carbon Cycle Animals Plants Carbon dioxide Oxygen Decay Nutrients Food chains Sunlight The oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle Energy sources for plants: sunlight, nutrients, water Energy sources for animals: food, water Decomposers don’t need energy Here’s how high school students generally interpret what they are told about the carbon cycle. Two separate cycles One involving solids: plant growth, food chains, and nutrient recycling The oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle. Most high school students don’t worry about where the carbon comes from or goes to. This leaves people with an idea that there are good and bad processes ion terms of global warming but not with the idea that all those carbon atoms gotta go SOMEWHERE, and it matters where we put ‘em.

Findings: Inquiry Connections between first-hand inquiry (learning through your own investigations) and second-hand inquiry (learning from claims made by other people or in the media) Key questions: Who do you trust? What evidence do you trust? What arguments do you trust? Our findings for inquiry are not as well validated as our findings for discourse and accounts, but I think that the issues around inquiry are too important to ignore. SLIDE

Changes in Public Opinion What causes climate change? Human Activity Natural Geological Causes April, 2008 47% 34% January, 2010 Note the volatility of public opinion People decide about the science of climate change the same way as they decide about health care legislation Source: Newsweek, March 1, 2010 Here’s an example of the kind of issue I associate with second-hand inquiry. SLIDE I want to say “whoa. climate change NOT a political issue. It is a biophysical process that is taking place in our atmosphere, which is not consulting the opinion polls.”

Findings from Our Research How do students make decisions about scientific facts relevant to environmental issues? USUALLY use personal and family knowledge USUALLY use ideas from media and popular culture OFTEN make judgments about bias and self interest in people and organizations making knowledge claims RARELY make use of knowledge they learned in school RARELY make explicit judgments about the scientific quality of evidence or arguments (though our questions on this weren’t great) (Covitt, Tan, Tsurusaki, & Anderson, in revision) This kind of distinction, though, seems to be clearer to me than it is to students that we interviewed about a couple of environmental issues (buying strawberry products and allowing a bottled water company to drill a well in a watershed for a trout stream). Here’s how they made decisions about relevant scientific facts. SLIDE

What’s Our Goal? Scientific Inquiry and Argument Uncertainty as a core issue for scientific inquiry (Metz, 2004) Scientific position: Our knowledge of past, present, and future is inevitably uncertain BUT We can reduce uncertainty, by: Giving authority to arguments from evidence rather than individual people Commitment to rigor in research methods Collective validation through consensus of scientific communities So what do we WANT students to do when they have to make judgments about the quality of a knowledge claim? I’ve been convinced by Kathy Metz that most of our current treatments of inquiry miss a core point. We need to pay much more attention to how we deal with uncertainty. SLIDE.

Values in the Science Curriculum The value of scientific knowledge and arguments from evidence should have an explicit role in the curriculum Scientific knowledge should play an essential role in environmental decisions. In particular, it can help us anticipate the effects of our individual and collective actions. We should use scientific standards (authority of evidence, rigor in method, collective validation) to judge knowledge claims. We should NOT teach what to do about climate change or other environmental issues in the required science curriculum If people truly understand the effects of their actions, then they are much more likely to make responsible decisions. So all this comes around to an issue that I know you will have to deal with: the role of values in the science curriculum, especially with respect to controversial environmental issues. I think that the important value here is NOT advocacy for particular courses of action. SLIDE

What’s at Stake? CORE GOAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION: Give people the ability to choose between scientific and force-dynamic discourse; don’t leave them without a choice Make a place for scientific knowledge and arguments from scientific evidence in political discourse and personal decision making. NOTE that this is a different goal from getting people to accept the authority of science. Never in my career has the science curriculum been so important Our children will live with the consequences of our actions today, and the atmosphere, our water systems, and our biological communities do not know about our political and cultural divisions. What happens to them depends on our collective actions, not our opinions, and our best hope for anticipating the consequences of our actions lies in our scientific knowledge and in our ability to mount arguments from evidence. These are cultural resources that we MUST share and use. IF we educate students who have that choice THEN science will have its place. SLIDE

Thanks to Contributors to this Research Hui Jin, Jing Chen, Li Zhan, Josephine Zesaguli, Hsin-Yuan Chen, Brook Wilke, Hamin Baek, Kennedy Onyancha, Jonathon Schramm, Courtney Schenk, Jennifer Doherty, and Dante Cisterna at Michigan State University Lindsey Mohan at National Geographic Education Programs Kristin Gunckel at the University of Arizona Beth Covitt at the University of Montana Laurel Hartley at the University of Colorado, Denver Edna Tan at the University of North Carolina Blakely Tsurusaki at Washington State University, Pullman Rebecca Dudek at Holly, Michigan, High School Mark Wilson, Karen Draney, Jinnie Choi, and Yong-Sang Lee at the University of California, Berkeley. I want to thank the many people who have contributed to this research, and I’m open for questions.

Extra Slides

The Keeling Curve as an Example Here’s one example of something that I think our citizens need to understand.

What Does it Mean to “Understand” the Keeling Curve? Content answer: Students should be able to explain the mechanisms and predict the effects of atmospheric change Yearly cycle Long-term trend Practice answer: Students should be able to use what they know to act as informed citizens For us, “understanding” includes both content and practice dimensions SLIDE

Level 1 Example: Force-dynamic Discourse (4th grader; American pre-interview: baby growth) Researcher: Do you think the girl’s body uses the food for energy? Watson: Yes. Researcher: Do you know how? Watson: Because the food helps make energy for the girl so then she can like learn how to walk and crawl and stuff. And it will also help the baby so it will be happy, be not mean and stuff. Researcher: Yes, ok. Let’s talk about the next one. You said sleep, right? So say a little bit about that. How is it related to growth? Watson: Because it will make it somehow so you’ll grow. Because that way you will get more energy so you can like run and jump, and jump rope and walk and play. And that’s it. Researcher: Does the baby’s body need sleeping for energy? Watson: Yes. Because then it will be happy and it won’t cry. And it will be able to play and make it so it will eat and stuff. Researcher: What do you think is energy? What energy is like? Watson: I think energy is like, it helps it grow and it helps it so it won’t be crabby, like when you get mad. Our carbon learning progression has 4 levels. Here’s an example from my paper of a Level 1 student talking about sources of energy for a growing baby. Note: --Watson uses the word “energy” with confidence, as do students at all levels in our learning progression --He doesn’t mean the same thing by energy as we do at all. We see similar patterns for matter—students do not make a clear distinction between the matter as the “stuff” the world is made of and other kinds of “stuff.”

Level 4: Example: Scientific Discourse (7th Grader; Post-interview: tree growth) Researcher: So how does a tree use air? Eric: The carbon dioxide in the air contains molecules, atoms, I mean specifically oxygen and carbon, which will store away and break apart to store it and use as food. I: So do you think that the tree also uses water? Eric: Yes. The tree also needs water. All living things do. The water is used to help break apart food so that the tree can have energy. It’s also used to combine parts of the water molecules together with parts of the carbon dioxide in photosynthesis and used as food. Researcher: So, you know, the tree, it begins as a very small plant. So over time, it will grow into a big tree and it will gain a lot of mass. Where does the increased mass come from? Eric: The mass comes from the food that the tree is producing during photosynthesis, which is mostly carbon and hydrogen pieces bonded together and that is then being stored away … … Researcher: So you also talk about energy, light energy. So where does light energy go? Eric: Light energy is, first it’s absorbed through the leaves. It is then converted to a stored energy by combining the hydrogen and carbon atoms into various molecules. Here’s a contrasting Level 4 account of tree growth (also in my paper) Here Eric has interconnected accounts of matter and energy that clearly distinguish between the two and that are constrained by conservation laws. SLIDE

Standards that Are Compact, Coherent, and Incomplete 2001: Project 2061 conference on developing curriculum materials based on Benchmarks My conclusion: Too many Benchmarks to teach them all for understanding Question: What is the filter that can help us make wise choices about what to leave out? My current career focus started after Jo Ellen Roseman asked me to help organize a conference of science education researchers to address the question of how to develop curriculum materials based on Benchmarks To make a long story short, my conclusion was that it couldn’t be done. There were just too many Benchmarks to teach them all for understanding in the time available for K-12 science teaching That led to an obvious question: What’s the filter that we could use to make wise choices about what to leave out?

Social Utility as the Filter My conclusion (based on experience with Benchmarks, NSES, NAEP, Michigan standards): Scientific importance does not work politically as a filter. Every topic in the current standards has passionate advocates who make compelling arguments for its scientific importance Alternate question: Will our nation suffer if most citizens do not understand this? The obvious filter is scientific importance: Let’s include only the VERY, VERY MOST IMPORTANT ideas and practices. After working with several groups that knew about the problem and promised to use this filter, my feeling is that it’s just about impossible to make this filter work. The people arguing for putting stuff in are always more determined and more passionate than the people arguing for leaving stuff out. AND they always have good arguments. So that led me to consider another filter: Social utility. A key question: Will our nation suffer if most citizens do not understand this? 2 areas where I see compelling “yes” answers to this question: biomedical and environmental I chose environmental Something about AP, etc.

What Happened? Congressional debates about climate change East Anglia E-mails Record snowfall in Washington, DC Rajendra Pachauri consulting IPCC mistake on Himalayan glaciers Note that these affect judgments about people and organizations, but generally not arguments from evidence Any report with 4600 references to peer-reviewed studies is likely to let something slip through.

Possible Consequences Political discourse and personal decisions dominated by different subcultures each constructing their own “reality”—the Prius drivers, the SUV drivers, etc. BUT the Earth’s atmosphere, water systems, and biological communities do not know about political discourse In 50 years we will know for sure who is right and who is wrong Our children and grandchildren will live with the consequences So here’s what worries me: Its one thing to accept that I will never agree with some people about whether we are descended from apes or not- alternate views of the past. The earth just has one future, though, and our children will be living in it. So if we can have SLIDE.

Learning Progressions: Addressing Both the Forest and the Trees “Learning progressions are descriptions of the successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about a topic that can follow one another as students learn about and investigate a topic over a broad span of time.” (NRC, Taking Science to School, 2007) Here’s a definition from a recent NRC report. Start with the learning progressions slide. I’ve been involved in science ed research for 30- years and standards and large scale assessment for 20. For much of that time its been like having 2 unconnected careers and focusing in the big picture-the forest- and the other on details of teaching and learning individual topics-the trees.

Upper Anchor: Processes in Socio-ecological Systems (Loop Diagram based on LTER Decadal Plan) This is how we conceive of our goal--what we call the loop diagram. This is Figure 1 in the Mohan, et al., article and Figure 3 in the Gunckel, et al., paper. I can give you a long story of how I chose this domain but for now suffice it to say that I do NOT have a background in environmental education. Around 2003 I had a 3 part epiphany: We have too many standards to teach them all for understanding. The core that we should focus on should include knowledge and practices essential for all citizens. Env. Sci. literracy is at the top of their list. Note that the science curriculum is in the right-hand box Ideas we associated with the social studies curriculum are in the left hand box There are 2 connecting arrows --how we depend on environmental systems --how we alter environmental systems, deliberately or unintentionally Environmental literacy involves being able to connect that box with the arrows. What is essential scientific knowledge for ALL our citizens? Only a few things, and this is one of them.

Informal Interpretation of Heredity and Environment Heredity, determining the essential nature of the organism Environment, determining needs and adaptations Phenotype resulting from “balance of forces” between heredity and environment #4 makes the point that these specific models and principles are embedded in more general forms of discourse. I have been very much influenced by Steven Pinker on this issue. Pinker argues that there is a theory of how the world works built into the semantics and grammar of our language. This theory interprets the events of the world as resulting from the pushes and pulls of actors with different purposes and different powers and different needs. So in this view heredity and environment are 2 kinds of influences on the development of organisms. Heredity and environment both shape the organism by “pulling in different directions.”

Scientific Interpretation of Heredity and Environment Genetic resources constrain phenotypic plasticity Phenotype (morphology and behavior) is determined by organism’s response to biological community and non-living environment The scientific account is subtly but importantly different-genetic resources determine the range of phenotypic . SLIDE Why is this important? -rules replace foreses (?) -natural selection replaces Lamarckianion as mechanism of change. Notes about scientific model: Heredity and environment act differently Phenotypic response does not affect genetic resources Diversity of genetic resources becomes essential for change

Hypothesis: Alternate Learning Trajectories LEVEL 4. Causal Reasoning Pattern: Successful Constraints on Processes Across Scales LEVEL 3. Causal Reasoning Pattern: Unsuccessful Constraints on Processes LEVEL 3. Causal Reasoning Pattern: Successful Constraints on atomic-molecular processes with limited details LEVEL 2. Causal Reasoning Pattern: Hidden Mechanisms involving changes of matter or energy LEVEL 2. Causal Reasoning Pattern: Macroscopic changes of matter/energy constrained by conservation laws LEVEL 1. Macro Force-dynamic Causation Structure-first Learning Trajectory Principles-first Learning Trajectory ? This is Figure 5 in the Gunckel, et al., paper We are seeing some preliminary indications of alternate—and perhaps more and less effective—learning trajectories One adds scientific detail to what remain essentially force dynamic explanations. The other gives priority to principled reasoning.

Matter and Energy Process Tool Example Car Running Process: Scale: (Matter Input) (Matter Output) (Energy Output) (Energy Input) Chemical Energy Heat Motion Octane (CH3(CH2)6CH3) (liquid) Water (H2O) (gas) Oxygen (O2) (gas) Carbon Dioxide (CO2) (gas) Combustion Atomic-molecular Most of what I would say about question 4 would essentially repeat Taking Science to School. But let me show you a couple of examples of tools that we are trying out as ways to support principled reasoning. This one focuses on developing accounts that conserve matter and energy.

Powers of Ten Example This one focuses on connecting systems and processes across the hierarchy of scales.