Developing 21st Century Skills with Investigative Cases: Building Global Awareness Margaret Waterman, Ph.D. Biology Department Southeast Missouri State University College of Science, Technology and Agriculture Honors Convocation April 23, 2012

What are 21 st century skills? How can we teach to accomplish these? Investigative Cases & Cyberlearning Agenda

21 st Century Skills 4 Cs Critical thinking and problem solving Creativity and innovation Communication Collaboration Interdisciplinary Themes  Global Awareness  Financial, Economic, Business Literacy  Civic Literacy

How can we teach to address 21 st century skills? Make teaching problem centered Doing this leads to interdisciplinary learning Teach 21 st century learners Technology savvy Cyberlearning tools and resources

Most important: Use Knowledge of How People Learn Teach content within MEANINGFUL realistic contexts Stories Cases Projects Problems

Investigative Cases Started in medical schools in 1970s as PBL. Modified PBL for science starting in late 80s, early 90s. Investigative Cases started in mid 90s, adding the scientific inquiry side to PBL

May, 2010, Near Mobile Alabama "Hmph," Ramona grunted as she read the local news online at the coffee shop. "What now?" her friend Gil asked. "Well, it looks like BP is going to pay for protecting our beaches here in Alabama," she said, "but they only have enough materials to protect 25% of the coast! It says that if the spill keeps gushing, we’ll have oil onshore by mid June." Mobile Bay Alabama, near Gil and Ramona's neighborhood “That’s just about a month," Gil figured. "I wonder how they’ll decide?“ “They say that a team of experts from NOAA and locals are going to use something called an ESI map.“ "Hmph," Gil said.

Start with a Story Ask “What is this story about?” Ask “what do you already know about the story?” And “What do you need to find out?” Discuss the things students know, what they need to know and then….

Waterman & Stanley 2011 Linking Investigative Cases to Cyberlearning Tools Examples Remote sensing Simulations Data visualization tools

What happened after the spill?

So far: Used a story to have land-bound midwesterners think about the ecology of another part of the US NEXT Gaining even broader perspective by using a global problem.

What’s for Lunch ? At the Towers Cafeteria, Yuki picked up her order of fresh orange juice and a plate of stir fried chicken and vegetables. Now it was Elise’s turn. “Cheeseburger and milk, please,” Elise told the server. As they carried their food to the table, Yuki asked “How can you eat that? It costs so much.” “What do you mean? It’s only $2.95 on special.,” Elise said. “And, after all my workouts at the gym, I’ve earned it!” “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Yuki said.

Yuki pulled out a magazine and showed Elise this page.

My footprint My footprint in India

Use a Carbon Tracker to Develop Awareness

Online tools for data visualization Used for Interdisciplinarity, developing questions and hypotheses, examining relationships among variables, interpreting data Worldmapper Gapminder: A Data Centered View of the World www. Gapminder.org

Objective: Tools for Visualizing Data

Total Carbon emissions by country

Gapminder: redisplaying same data AND ??

What else can affect life expectancy?

NSF RCN-UBE

Margaret Waterman, 2011 Collaborator Dr. Ethel Stanley, Director of BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium Funding:

THANK YOU!!