About the InTeGrate Project
By the time today's undergraduates send their children to college, there will be more than eight billion people on Earth. Our climate will be punctuated by extreme weather events. One or more major metropolitan areas may have experienced a devastating earthquake or volcanic eruption. Energy resources will be strained and more expensive. This world requires both an Earth literate public and a workforce that can bring geoscience to bear on tough societal issues. Developing widespread Earth literacy and this workforce are the objectives of the InTeGrate project.
InTeGrate, the NSF-funded STEP Center in the geosciences, ran from 2012 through 2019. The STEP (STEM Talent Expansion Program) Center program enabled "a group of faculty representing a cross section of institutions of higher education to identify a national challenge or opportunity in undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and to propose a comprehensive and coordinated set of activities that will be carried out to address that challenge or opportunity within a national context."
InTeGrate sought to improve Earth literacy and build a workforce prepared to tackle urgent environmental and resource issues facing humanity. To this end, we supported interdisciplinary teaching about Earth and environmental issues across the undergraduate curriculum. The project collected and synthesized existing work into an extensive website; developed, tested and published 26 curriculum modules, 6 courses, and 16 program models; implemented large professional development programs involving more than 1500 educators; and created a national scale community which continues to work toward these goals.
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project team, including the leadership team, assessment team, planning committees and advisory board.
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In aggregate, InTeGrate programming created a large, diverse community of practice that is poised to continue into the future. At the core of this community are the 1678 project participants in materials development, implementation programs, workshops, webinars and project leadership. More than 4600 individuals have engaged with the project in some way including those that have expressed interest in using the materials. During the course of the project this community developed a shared goals, values and philosophy, interacted regularly, improved its practices, and created products of value to the community. This community continues to interact, learn together, and grow through the NAGT On the Cutting Edge Professional Development Program. Leadership developed during the project is carrying forward the goals, values, philosophy and strategies that are signatures of the project.
InTeGrate's approach to teaching emphasized building interdisciplinary connections between geoscience and societal issues and using proven high-impact teaching practices that focus on active learning, working with data, and problem-solving. InTeGrate created an effective and scalable system for collaborative development of undergraduate instructional materials. The resulting materials have proven to be adaptable to a variety of institutional and instructional contexts and educative for the faculty who use them. InTeGrate materials have been adapted, adopted, or used as inspiration in more than 3000 courses enrolling more than 110,000 students at more than 1000 institutions of higher education in the United States. Given the difficulty of obtaining information on use, these numbers are surely an underestimate. Students taught with InTeGrate's materials show increased mastery of systems thinking, which is essential for tackling many environmental grand challenges and yet is difficult to teach. Instruction with InTeGrate materials may be closing some pre-existing gaps in geoscience literacy among women and under-represented minorities (URM) and increasing motivation among URM's towards careers involving the Earth and environment. InTeGrate's curriculum development system has been adapted by other projects.
InTeGrate expanded the opportunities for students to learn about the Earth. First and foremost this was accomplished by infusing geoscience content into courses and programs across the curriculum, opening up new venues for learning outside of geoscience programs. Nearly 50% of the teaching materials developed by InTeGrate were designed for use in humanities, social science, or interdisciplinary courses, and five of the program models demonstrate how geoscience learning can be infused in interdisciplinary programs. In addition, InTeGrate piloted program models that focused on increasing access to learning about Earth through on-line courses and programs, expanding programming at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and strengthening preparation of teachers to teach about Earth.
Faculty participating in the project became better teachers. The strongest teaching was observed in faculty involved in materials development, but the benefits extend to participants at all levels of engagement. Even faculty who use InTeGrate's materials with no professional support are observed to implement high-impact teaching practices above national norms in undergraduate geoscience. Many project participants also became more interested in interdisciplinary teaching and collaboration and some developed important skills in assessing student learning or educational research. Through their work on InTeGrate, some participants have emerged as leaders, subsequently taking on roles in the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and its professional development programs, obtaining grant funding for research, and leading collaborative efforts to improve geoscience education. In all aspects of the project, InTeGrate worked diligently to include diverse individuals, as well as educators from all types of institutions. Thus, these impacts are spread broadly throughout the geoscience community and beyond.
The first goal of the InTeGrate project is to develop curricula that will dramatically increase Earth literacy of all undergraduate students. This includes the large majority of students that do not major in the geosciences, those who are historically under-represented in the geosciences, and future K-12 teachers, such that they are better positioned to make sustainable decisions in their lives and as part of the broader society.
Objectives related to Goal 1: Developing curricula
- Develop a robust understanding of current practices and perceived needs using the professional development workshop program and virtual opportunities for input.
- Use multi-institutional teams to develop and test new materials designed to foster geoscience literacy in:
- Introductory geoscience courses
- Interdisciplinary courses across the curriculum
- Courses for future teachers
- Support implementation of courses across the curriculum that teach geoscience literacy by:
- Making tested curriculum materials and information about their use widely available;
- Building awareness of new materials and models for their adaptation and use;
- Supporting program implementations that demonstrate approaches to teaching geoscience literacy to diverse students in different institutional types and instructional settings.
- Assess the impact of new materials and courses on students' geoscience literacy and their ability to make sustainable decisions, including the impact on those who are historically under-represented in the geosciences, and on future K-12 teachers.
The second major goal is to increase the number of majors in the geosciences and related fields who are able to work with other scientists, social scientists, business people, and policy makers to develop viable solutions to current and future environmental and resource challenges.
Objectives related to Goal 2: Preparing students for a workforce for a sustainable future
- Develop, document and disseminate a robust understanding of current practices, characteristics of successful programmatic models, and perceived needs and barriers.
- Support development, documentation, and dissemination of a set of new model programs based on an understanding of current practice that include:
- Interdisciplinary programs, majors or certificate programs with a strong geoscience component designed to prepare students for careers addressing challenges of sustainability;
- Programs that engage students with issues of sustainability and their scientific underpinnings and provide a continuous pathway from high school to a STEM degree;
- Programs that broaden access to science by introducing geoscience broadly into the liberal arts curriculum;
- Inter-institutional programs that bring geoscience into courses at institutions without geoscience faculty including minority-serving institutions and 2YCs;
- Programs that introduce geoscience into the preparation of teachers, including but not limited to Earth science teachers;
- Programs that introduce geoscience into the preparation of STEM majors outside the geosciences.
- Develop and test new materials and courses that support these programs.
- Assess impact of programs on the number of majors in the geosciences and associated fields as well as on students' ability and motivation to use insights from the geosciences in addressing grand challenges of sustainability.
Achieving these goals requires a revolution in how geo-education is perceived and practiced, as well as the roles that learning about the Earth play in the broader curriculum in institutions of higher education. Connecting geoscience education to societal challenges has the potential to increase enrollment in geoscience and allied courses, thus strengthening the field while serving society. Learn more about InTeGrate's approach to connecting education to societal challenges from: InTeGrate Pedagogy: Themes and strategies.
To start this revolution, an integrated, community-based approach combines the following elements:
- Developing teaching materials and evaluation of new teaching resources and instructional strategies,
- Program models to incorporate teaching about the Earth throughout the undergraduate curriculum,
- Professional development and dissemination strategies to promote widespread adoption of these new approaches.
- Assessment and Project Evaluation ensure that the materials and programs developed by the program effectively meet their stated goals and objects, and that project activities in aggregate meet the overarching goals of the project.
The 2011 NSF awards included two STEP Center awards, this one in the geosciences and one in engineering (the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP)).
See the NSF STEP Center Solicitation
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Sponsoring Organizations
American Meteorological Society, American Geological Institute, American Geophysical Union, Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence, Geological Society of America, Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, National Association of Geoscience Teachers, National Council for Science and the Environment, Ocean Leadership and Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, On the Cutting Edge.
This work is sponsored by the following organizations:
This work is supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) collaboration between the Directorates for Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Geosciences (GEO) under grant DUE - 1125331.
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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