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Data-Driven versus Concept-Driven Animations

Posted: May 28 2011 by Kim Kastens One of my early Earth & Mind posts explored how Clark & Wiebe's (2000) idea of "concept-driven visualizations" and "data-driven visualizations" would play out in geosciences. A concept-driven visualization is generated from a concept or theory in the mind of a scientist or scientific illustrator. Although the concept was originally constructed from observations of the earth, the visualization itself is not directly tied to a specific empirical data set. In contrast, a data-driven visualization uses empirical data to formulate the visualization. There is a direct digital chain of custody from the data set to the visualization.

I now realize that a similar distinction can be drawn among scientific animations. We can think of "concept-driven animations," and "data-driven animations." More

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Learning to Learn from Data

Posted: Feb 15 2011 by

Kim Kastens

Scientists learn from data. Learning to learn from data is obviously an essential aspect of the education of a future scientist.

These days, however, many other kinds of people also learn from data--including business people, investors, education leaders, and people who care about pollution, disease, or the quality of their local schools. My daily newspaper is rich in data-based graphs and maps--and so is the newsletter from my local library. These days, learning to learn from data is a necessary part of everyone's education.

However, learning to learn from data is not a typical part of everyone's education. This post explores what might be required to construct a thorough learning progression for learning from Earth Science data, beginning where a good elementary school leaves off and carrying on through to what an upper level college course or adult job might demand. More

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Multiple lines of reasoning in support of one claim

Posted: Nov 22 2010 by Kim Kastens One of the attributes of most K-12 classroom science inquiries is that the reasoning that leads from data to interpretation is simple and straightforward. From this experience, students develop the habit of mind of expecting that a data set in science class will lead by a single linear robust chain of reasoning to a claim or "answer," like this:

Earth Science, in my experience, tends not to work this way. Instead, many of the most bold and important claims in Earth Science have been built from many different forms of data and observations. More

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Astronomers' Tricks with Light

Posted: Nov 1 2010 by Kim Kastens This semester I am teaching a section of Frontiers of Science, the science course in Columbia University's famous Core Curriculum. Under the auspices of the core curriculum, generation upon generation of Columbia undergraduates have studied great accomplishments of human creativity in literature, art, music and philosophy. Beginning seven years ago, the powers that be decided that science is also a great accomplishment of humanity, and added the "Frontiers" course.

This semesters' version spans four disciplines: Brain & Behavior (Neuroscience), Astronomy, Earth Science, and Biodiversity. The topics are intended to encompass material that most students would not have studied in high school, so that every student finds something interesting and challenging in the course. A side effect of this course design is that no single faculty member knows all or even most of the material. The College has tried hard to establish a supportive community of practice among the nineteen seminar leaders, and sharing ideas across disciplines has been one of the more rewarding aspects of teaching the course.

The metamessage that is supposed to be accumulating across the four topics is "Scientific Habits of Mind," how scientists think and learn. The course materials never use the term "Epistemology," but that is in large part what this course is about--how scientists know what they know. I've been using the Claims/Evidence/Reasoning mantra that I picked up from the IQWST curriculum developers to articulate the elements that students need to incorporate into a scientific explanation. I have been stunned to realize how different is the nature of evidence and reasoning in the four disciplines we are teaching. More

Temporal Reasoning in Geosciences

Posted: Sep 28 2010 by Kim Kastens

Claim, Evidence, Reasoning. One school of thought in science education places great emphasis on fostering students' ability to articulate a claimabout an aspect of the world, back up that claim with evidence, and construct a coherent line of reasoning to show that the evidence does indeed support the claim.

In geology, the evidence often has to do with the timing, or sequence, or rates, of events in the past. Dozens of geologist-lifetimes have been invested in figuring out to constrain what happened at what time in earth history. And then thousands of geologist-lifetimes have been invested in using these techniques to attach dates to bits of rock or mud. Geology students spend entire courses learning to think about dates, times, and ages, via fossils, via magnetic signature of rocks and mud, via stable isotope ratios, via unstable isotope ratios, via geometry of cross-cutting relationships.

So what is the big deal about dates and ages? Why spend so much time and effort on these factoids? More