The Carbon Cycle Project

Collaborating Institutions: Michigan State University; BEAR Center, UC Berkeley

Funded by: National Science Foundation

Michigan State University Participants:

BEAR Participants: Karen Draney, Mark Wilson (co-PI)

The Carbon Cycle Project involves the development of a research-based learning progression for an important topic in the life, physical, and earth sciences: Transformations of matter and energy in biogeochemical systems, focusing on the ecological carbon cycle and human effects on that cycle. These processes are a fundamental part of the K-12 science curriculum, and their importance is likely to grow in the future. Human populations draw sustenance through these transformations of matter and energy. As our populations grow and our technologies become more powerful, our responsibilities for maintaining these systems will grow, too.

We are currently developing learning progressions, and accompanying teaching experiments, for investigating student learning of several key concepts involved in the carbon cycle. These include the tracing of matter through systems, the growth of biological and engineered systems, energy, inquiry, and citizenship. In this presentation, we focus on the first of these.

We have examined student responses to carbon cycle items at several levels of schooling, from elementary to high school, and have used the patterns we have noticed to design the progress variables that form our learning progression. We will be discussing the development process, and the current versions of the progress variables.

We are currently designing additional items on a variety of scales, including molecular level changes, cellular metabolic processes, macroscopic processes, and large-scale processes in ecosystems. We are ensuring that our items have several levels of scaffolding, from those in which students are explicitly reminded to explain matter changes at other than the macroscopic level, to those in which students are asked about processes for which a satisfactory answer would require more than one level, but are not explicitly reminded to do this. We thus hope to examine the process by which students come to understand how these various levels are connected.

In addition, we will soon be engaging in a number of teaching experiments. These will involve week-long curricular units, centered around the carbon cycle. As part of these experiments, we will be administering pretests and posttests, and at least one embedded activity, centered around the learning progression and associated items. We will use the data gathered to understand how students' thinking changes with small amounts of focused instruction, and to further refine our understanding of the learning progression.