Using Project EDDIE modules in Chemistry of the Environment
About this Course
Chemistry of the Environment
EDDIE Module Developed
One of today's education challenges is to provide students with the opportunity to develop quantitative skills related and applied to a STEM education. The module's objectives are to support student's acquisition of data inquiry using environmental relevant datasets and common plotting platform for data interpretation.
Jump to: Course Context | Teaching Details | Student Outcomes
Relationship of EDDIE Module(s) to my Course
The content of the course syllabus was designed to provide a hands-on experience on all the environmental compartments (water, soil, biota, and air) to students. This module was taught towards the end of the course, during the last unit on air. By this time, students had already become familiar with lab reports and presenting data from their labs. Students were asked to go over the student handout and instructor presentation beforehand, so students would have the opportunity to ask questions ahead of time or during the pilot of the module.
Teaching Details
What key suggestions would you give to a colleague before they used the activity in their teaching?
Posting the materials ahead of time is a great help for all participants. Moreover, instructors are encouraged to work on all activities (pre-class, A, B, and C) by themselves prior teaching the module. This helps to identify potential roadblocks in the classroom. For example, the time for downloading the datasets will vary depending on the internet connection. Finally, the instructor must make sure that students will have access to a computer (laptop or PC) with Excel on Microsoft 365 on Windows. If students bring their own laptops, they should also bring the battery charger. For his module, tablets, chrome books, or smart phones will not work due to the amount of data that participants will be using.
How did you address challenges in teaching with the module?
To address the challenge of downloading the datasets from the main website, the datasets were downloaded and shared with the students prior teaching the module. This shortened the time for those students who were having issues downloading the datasets from the main website. Moreover, the instructor can make available a second group of datasets with curated data to students, so they do not have scroll down over thousand of data points on the spreadsheets.
To address the challenge of computers, instructors must make sure that sufficient computers (laptops or PCs) will be available in the classroom, so students who do not have their own computers can use the classroom computers. If this were the case, it would be a good idea to have students testing the computer(s) ahead of time.
Student Outcomes
The module influenced the students' quantitative reasoning in the following ways: 1) students were not only looking at the arithmetic means, but looking at the entire distribution of the data; 2) students identified the common ways that data can be distributed and what that distribution means; and 3) students had the opportunity to plot their data on common graphs and to draw conclusions from their graphs.
The module influenced students' ability to work with data in the following ways: 1) students became familiar with using technical and scientific datasets from a government agency; 2) students worked with historical and current large datasets that can be used for research purposes; and 3) students strengthened their ability to work on the graphic interface of Excel.