Introduction to the ESSCC Testbed

This plan to develop the Earth System Science Community Curriculum testbed describes a well-defined, time-phased suite of activities which builds on the experience ECOlogic Corporation has had at Gonzaga College High School in developing a network-enabled, research-oriented Earth system science curriculum (Ecologica) for NASA and describes a process whereby we can reach out to members of the educational, scientific, and computer science communities and the general public through implementation of an Internet-based testbed to establish a broader program in support of student investigation of the Earth system. We propose to scale the ESS curriculum from the classroom laboratory to the community testbed by enabling the community to evaluate its own needs in the process of curriculum development. Aided by the networking approach we describe, all participants in this educational community are made aware of modifications and refinements--almost in real-time--such that the entire suite of activities may be described as being in a continuous state of directed evolution, proceeding in step with the technological and scientific advances of EOSDIS and HPCCI and the USGCRP community at a scale appropriate for the average citizen.

The Earth System Science Community Curriculum testbed will focus the efforts of several organizations working in parallel development on the curriculum's human and technological infrastructure. Evaluation, project-tracking and quality control capabilities will be built into the curriculum through the testbed. The community consists of individuals involved in any way in the curriculum development process: high school and university students, software developers, faculty, and mentoring scientist. The proposed community will be novel in its collaborative investigation of the Earth system over the Internet, analysis of Earth science data and derivation of scientific information, method of evaluating student learning, distributed administrative structure, and application of information tools and resources. Curriculum refers to the design and organization of human communications, technology applications, and human interactions with resources and tools, optimized for investigation of the Earth system.

This approach recognizes that technology is a tool and should be applied to achieve a specific goal, serving human needs to work and communicate. However, like Ecologica, this approach also recognizes that the challenges of introducing technology to the classroom have more to do with human dynamics--how people relate to each other, the use of data, and the application of tools--than with the functionality and capability of technology. Thus, in order to bring a scaled-down version of ESS into the classroom and to scale up from the classroom to the community requires a rethinking, a re-engineering, of curriculum development processes and human relationships. (Stedman, 1992) This requires inductive reasoning about instructional design and recognition that instructional design is a highly interactive, collaborative process involving all stakeholders. (Hammer, 1993) In our definition, curriculum development, which involves a variety of participants and requires networked scientific computing facilities and a connection to the Internet, results in a process, rather than a product which can be shrink-wrapped and disseminated. This process must be directed, structured and supported as the community grows, in order to enable adaptation and evolution. Student investigation is the central process around which all other processes are organized and optimized. In this sense, curriculum refers to an integrated, streamlined and standardized set of processes (and sub-processes) to enable student teams and supporting faculty to collaborate, investigate, and access a wide range of content topics. (Laurel, 1990) These processes define and schedule multi-tiered activities at the macro and micro scale. For example, curriculum processes not only structure and schedule human communications and human interactions with tools and resources, but are also embedded in software functionality.

By the end of the proposed three year grant period, we will have established a comprehensive system designed to enable faculty from any school with the minimum networked scientific computing facilities and training to implement the curriculum, efficiently and effectively, and begin to investigate Earth system science. Resources and materials generated in the course of the project will continue to be available for use by other people and organizations on the Internet via the World-Wide Web URL: 198.76.12.2/ ESSCC.html, our Earth System Science Community Curriculum, Gopher and other information digital libraries. The expected outcome of the three-year program proposed here, will be dramatic improvement in science education in participating schools demonstrated by the quality of student-led research and faculty-led consortia of schools, universities, industry and public agencies which have invested themselves in a strategic planning and proposal writing process to enable students to investigate the Earth system in their region.

The focus of ESS, with its systems of interacting subsystems, is uniquely suited to team-based investigation. We began to design a curriculum which represented ESS investigative processes at the classroom scale. In 1992, we prepared a proposal to develop a classroom ESS curriculum for the K-12 initiative administered by NASA High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Division. In 1993, we were selected by NASA and received funding for partial salaries and hardware. Our school continued to pay us for the classes we were teaching, provided us with a classroom and furniture, and paid our utilities and maintenance expenses. We reapplied to NASA, and received supplementary funding in FY94.

We sought and evaluated tools that were in the public domain or commercially available but inexpensive. (Barrett, 1989) Compatibility with the Macintosh and PC/Windows 3.1 computing platforms and data formats used in EOSDIS were our only requirements. We identified NCSA visualization products (Collage, Image) and consulted NCSA several times on their application in the classroom. We tested Imagic, a geographic information system for remotely-sensed image viewing and manipulation, and XV for the SGI, another visualization tool. A NASA scientist recommended STELLA II for modeling systems. (Hayes, 1993) We identified NCSA Mosaic as an integrated search and retrieval engine and a publication environment which would enable our students to synthesize the products of all other software applications into their text-based research. Mosaic could also serve as the single interface to our collection of tools. (Laurel, 1990)

At Gonzaga College High School, we have already implemented a successful ESS curriculum development program in our classroom: Ecologica. We now intend to scale the ESS curriculum from the classroom laboratory to the community testbed. By involving the community in all aspects of the investigation, we intend to establish a foundation for systemic reform in science education. An overview of the development of Ecologica follows which will establish a sound basis for discussing the community curriculum development program in detail and presenting our funding requirements in a national context. Ecologica serves as a demonstration model for the community-wide activities addressed in the design of the ESSCC testbed. (Elton, 1991) In the process of community curriculum development, the schools participating in the ESS community will learn to apply this model in their region as a tool, as we will have done nationally in the ESSCC testbed. Our ultimate objective is to develop leadership. Empowering participating faculty and schools with the intellectual and operational tools necessary to establish regional research consortia in Earth System Science will lay the foundation for long-term systemic reform in science education. Ecologica has addressed the national debate on information infrastructure formation, its costs and role in the classroom. The curriculum makes productive use of many products of public investment, from the Internet to public domain software and NASA data, by placing these resources into the hands of students in a meaningful way. It is now appropriate to implement the curriculum at the community scale which will broaden the accessibility and useability of NASA data and public computational resources to include the Internet audience.

The Earth System Science Community Curriculum Testbed

keeler@jacks.gsfc.nasa.gov