Allison Dunn: Using Earth's Thermostat in Physical Geography at Worcester State University
About this Course
An introductory course with mostly non-majors, but also serves as an important recruitment tool to our major.
32
per section (two sections taught) students
Two 75-minute lecture sessions per week
Syllabus for Allison Dunn's Physical Geography class (Acrobat (PDF) 393kB Jun21 16)
Introduction to earth systems and processes. Characteristics and distribution of landforms, climates, water, soils, plants, animals.
- Identify Earth's four spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere) and describe their interactions.
- Recognize that the Earth's surface is dynamic and is influenced by running water, wind, waves, glaciers, and other processes.
- Read and interpret maps, including topographic, climate, and hazard, and assess how they interface with the human environment.
- Understand the methods by which maps are created, including a comprehension of the need for map projections, sources of spatial and attribute data used in the creation of maps, and techniques used in the collection, display, and storage of spatial data.
- Explain how the Earth-Sun relationship drives seasons, climate, and atmospheric motions.
- Describe how human understanding of the forces shaping the earth has evolved over time.
- Recognize the inherent uncertainty in assessing past and future climate trends, and how to reconcile this uncertainty to draw reasonable conclusions.
- Assess the ways human activities have changed the earth's four spheres, and how this has impacted the natural environment.
- Recognize the human-environment relationship in terms of humans as modifiers of environment and impacts of natural phenomena on humans.
Capturing Students' Interest with Real Data
I teach Physical Geography, a survey class that introduces students to the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. It's a lot of material to cover in one semester, and it can be tempting to use a lot of lecture to cover as much ground as possible. From past experience, however, I know my students get a lot more out of the course and the content when they have the opportunity to participate in projects that involve active learning. I incorporated the Earth's Thermostat module in lieu of my typical coverage of chapters on Earth's energy balance, temperature, and climate change. My students really responded to the in-class activities, and you could hear an excited buzz as different groups worked their way through the material for each activity. I think this module is especially powerful because it lets students directly engage with the data behind a major societal issue (climate change). By working with the data itself, instead of reading about it in a text, they felt a greater ownership and understanding of this challenge facing our society.
My students were working with real data within the first five minutes of the module!
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My Experience Teaching with InTeGrate Materials
I teach a 75-minute class session. The module is designed to be easily split to fit a 75 minute period; e.g. instructors could present all of Unit 1 and the first half of Unit 2 in a session.
I did not present all six units of the module consecutively, but broke them up to fit better with the general course sequence. I did not, however, present them out of order.
Relationship of InTeGrate Materials to my Course
My course is a semester in length. The materials in Earth's Thermostat were presented in the third, fourth, and sixth week of the semester, interspersed among other material. Prior to the module, students had already learned basic material about systems thinking, maps, the Earth-Sun system, and the atmosphere. After covering Units 1-4, we covered climate change in more detail. The students had their first exam, and Units 5-6 followed shortly afterwards. Note that this sequence refers to the pilot version of the module. In the final version of the module, Units 4 and 5 are a two-day sequence (allowing instructors to go more in depth on radiation balance), and therefore could not be separated.
Prior to module: administered pre-survey concept sketch in the class before module start. With one section I handed it out after the class on the atmosphere, with one class I administered it before. Suggestion: instructors administer the survey before any class content on the atmosphere. I noticed the students who took it after the class on the atmosphere tried to replicate slides from that, which isn't necessarily what we were looking for.
Unit 1
- Implemented as described on the Unit 1 web page.
- It was helpful to check in with students as they were plotting temperature data; one common error was to plot anomalies incorrectly (e.g. 0.08 plotted as 0.8, etc).
- Student participation in temperature projection part of activity was great.
- I assigned the homework for this unit, including the calculation of earth's effective temperature (referenced in the slides at the end of the class notes).
- In the pilot, this took too long (60-65 minutes); we adjusted the final version to address this (in part by turning the solar irradiance group activity into a think-pair-share activity).
Unit 2
- Implemented as described on the Unit 2 web page.
- There were lots of opportunities for students to think-pair-share and work in groups and they seemed to enjoy this, warming up as the class went on.
- I had to provide a lot of help during the in-class development of the concept sketch (same as pre-survey question); we are going to increase the support for students as they practice this important skill.
- I did not assign any take-home questions, and collected the handout at the end of class for participation credit.
- In the pilot, this took too long (65 mins); we adjusted the final version to address this.
Unit 3
- Due to time constraints, I was not able to pilot this unit as planned (to do so would have shifted a midterm and disrupted the travel plans of a classroom observer).
Unit 4
- In the pilot, Unit 4 was a one-class jigsaw activity on Earth's energy balance. Based on our experience in the pilot, there was not nearly enough time to complete the jigsaw, even in a 75 minute class. In the final version of the module, Unit 4 is now broken into two class sessions and renamed Unit 4 and Unit 5. All my answers below refer to the pilot implementation, not the final implementation.
- In this activity, students start out in a specialty group looking at January radiation patterns for one of: incoming shortwave radiation, outgoing shortwave radiation, outgoing longwave radiation. In the second part of the jigsaw, students are grouped into longitudinal bands for study, ideally with one student from each specialty group.
- I knew that we would be pressed for time, so I handed out the specialty group assignments and worksheet at the end of the previous class, and posted the EBRE maps on Blackboard (our university's CMS). This may not have been too effective; without the promise of submitting the work at the beginning of class, many students didn't do it.
- To organize groups in the classroom, I labeled halves of manila folders with the specialty groups on one side, synthesis groups on the other. This makes it easy for students to know where to move to during class for both Units 4 and 5.
- I had a lot of problems getting the groups matched up right and my synthesis groups occasionally only had 2 in them. Definitely spend some time before class making sure you have the right groupings for both specialty and synthesis groups.
- Consider emailing students who missed class on the day of Unit 4 and assigning them a specialty and synthesis group. They can at least have a look at their specialty data before synthesizing it in groups during Unit 5.
- I gave a brief intro and did the "night lights" concept mapping example (which went well; they were able to ID several patterns in the data and hypothesize about the reasons behind them).
- Some members of groups concentrated just on their slice of longitude; it needs to be emphasized that the specialty map activity is for the whole planet.
- Every group needed some guidance to get them thinking about what they were looking at. But by the end (20+ minutes) each group seemed to have a good understanding of the factors behind their map.
- At the end of Unit 4, I used the 3 slides that gave an overview of each of the maps and key factors (e.g. angle of incidence for SWin).
There were two non-module classes between Units 4 and 5. At the end of the first of these intervening classes, I presented the brief background on volcanic eruptions and handed out the first assignment on volcanoes (found in the materials for Unit 3.) The instructor may wish to look at their class roster and determine the best way to assign the eruption to research. The online materials do it by letter of last name, but this could potentially result in lopsided group sizes.
Unit 5
- This is the second part of the radiation balance activity introduced in Unit 4. Here, students work in synthesis groups examining one latitudinal band, ideally with a student from each of the 3 specialty groups.
- Make sure you are able to get the activity sheet and graph paper out to all students quickly; I didn't have a plan and had a hard time getting everyone what they needed with all the questions that were coming my way.
- The concept of radiative balance is challenging for the students, and the revisions reflect the need to provide better information going in to the activity.
Unit 6
- Students came to class prepared with a short research paper on a historic volcanic eruption (Pinatubo, Krakatoa, or Tambora); this had been assigned approximately a week earlier.
- I broke students up into 2-3 groups per volcanic eruption. Groups were given approximately 10 minutes to discuss their findings and develop an executive summary of their eruption. This worked great! The classroom was full of buzz; it was clearly effective having the students come to class prepared with a short paper.
- Students spent 15 minutes presenting their summaries. The second and third group to present on an eruption just added material not already mentioned; this kept it moving.
- After each eruption was presented, I filled in the additional information provided in the slides.
- The last part of class was spent introducing the summative assessment to the students and discussing how to build a conceptual model.
Assessments
During the course of the module, I used the following assessments:
- Homework assignment after Unit 1. Students had some trouble calculating effective temperature, but we went over it in class.
- Homework assignment after Unit 4: I assigned the short research assignment on a historic volcanic eruption. I think they enjoyed this assignment and were surprised by what they learned. We have adjusted this assignment so that students are not guided towards what types of resources to use; we instead just ask them to evaluate the credibility of each resource at the end. This will provide a nice segue to discuss credible scientific sources in Unit 6.
- Summative assessment after Unit 6: For the most part, I was happy with what my students achieved with this assignment. This is an introductory course and most students are not science majors, and being asked to do work like this represented a big leap from what is typical in most survey courses. We have adjusted this assignment in the final version to provide more guidance to students as they develop a conceptual model.
Outcomes
I really hoped that using the InTeGrate materials would give students a better understanding of how Earth's atmosphere and climate system worked. The hope is that this would help them feel more personally invested in the societal challenge of climate change.
In terms of results, I think it was a mixed bag. During the module, I felt I was getting good feedback and responses (e.g. students correctly interpreting the effect of greenhouse gases by looking at transmission spectra). In the end, however, I'm not sure how much they really retained. On their final exams, I was still getting a lot of answers confusing ozone hole and climate change. I think they did get a reasonably good working knowledge of how volcanoes influence climate, but the connections between the radiation concepts and circulation concepts were hard for them to make.
One bright spot: I used the toolkit for analyzing my students' pre- and post- attitudinal survey results and found that my students did make significant gains in terms of their attitudes towards environmental issues and sustainability compared to their answers at the start of the semester.
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