Initial Publication Date: March 7, 2023

Doug Lombardi

Associate Professor, University of Maryland

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About Me

Prior to joining the academy, I have worked as a US Air Force meteorologist, federal laboratory research engineer, high school science teacher, and NASA education and public outreach manager. I have developed a strong interest in Earth's environments and am committed to promoting teaching and learning about environmental sustainability and civic collaboration. My partner and I live with our huskie-mix, Odie, just a short walk from the Chesapeake Bay and the mouth of the Susquehanna River. We love to walk and birdwatch, and on our walks, counting bald eagles is a particularly favorite pastime.

Focus of current FEW-Nexus-based education work

In my research, teaching, and outreach, I endeavor to help people more deeply understand about complex social and scientific issues, most of which are situated within the food-energy-water nexus (e.g., society's increasing demand for energy contributes to the human-induced climate crisis, which in turn limits freshwater and food supplies, and which further could contribute to the worldwide spread of disease). With many collaborators, my research draws from the psychological discipline and investigates effective learning environments that facilitate people's agency to effectively work within their local, regional, and global communities to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis, and ensure environmental stability, as well as food and water security.

My work parallels the visioning document in many ways. For example, my research and development team is composed of people from several disciplines, including science education, civics education, and psychology researchers, students, and middle and high school science and social studies teachers. To operate effectively, we have had to work collaboratively across our various worldviews and epistemic domains. These collaborations have resulted in enriching work that often considers fresh perspectives. The team has a focus on developing instructional scaffolds (materials and strategies) that is easily integrated into a variety of classroom settings including middle and high school, and undergraduate levels. My interactions with the NC-FEW K-12 group, as well as the leadership team, have also increased my knowledge and self-efficacy to part of the NC-FEW educational researcher team.

FEW-Nexus-based education experience, expertise and interests

Currently, I am the overall principal investigator on a collaborate NSF-funded project titled, "Scaffolding middle and high school students' scientific evaluations of sources and alternative claims in Earth and environmental sciences." The project's fundamental research questions are: (1) What are the features of instructional scaffolds that support middle and high school students to develop more critical source trustworthiness and claim plausibility evaluations? (2) When engaging in these instructional scaffolds, how do students' evaluations relate to their shifts in trustworthiness and plausibility judgments toward justifiable understandings (e.g., based on evidence and reasoning)? (3) How do these evaluations and judgments relate to changes in students' core disciplinary knowledge of social, civic, language arts, and scientific concepts related to socioscientific issues? As an area of focus, we are concentrating in food, energy, and water security, and are now developing and testing instructional materials and methods on dead zones and eutrophication, healthy soils and food production, and renewable energy. These are added to our existing suite of materials that include future availability of freshwater resources, impacts from fossil fuel extraction and use, and the current climate crisis.

Our project team investigates the efficacy and effectiveness of these materials by working with teams of researchers and classroom teachers. We collect data in middle school classrooms in the mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Southwest United States. Such data includes audio recordings and classroom artifacts. We use design-based research and advanced mixed methods analyses (e.g., combined discourse analysis-social network analysis) for in-situ analyses of civic and scientific practices in science, language arts, and social studies classrooms. I hope to share this experience with the NC-FEW education team, while learning about other cutting edge research methods from other researchers interested in NC-FEW education. I also bring over a decade experience and knowledge from the fields of science teaching, learning, and development. I currently have approximately 50 scholarly publications, many which have been written with collaborators, and I hope to expand this by teaming with other scholars interested in NC-FEW education.

Publications, presentations, and other references