This report offers an assessment of environmental literacy in America that is both sobering and hopeful. This summary of almost a decade of NEETF (National Environmental Education & Training Foundation) collaboration with Roper Reports provides a loud wake-up call to the environmental education community, to community leaders, and to influential specialists ranging from physicians to weathercasters. At a time when Americans are confronted with increasingly challenging environmental choices, we learn that our citizenry is by and large both uninformed and misinformed.
This is a report of the NSF Advisory Committee for Environmental Research. It contains a call to action, research priorities, and sections on environmental research and citizen science.
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NSF Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education
Climate Change: NASA’s Eyes on the Arctic is a multi-disciplinary outreach program built around a partnership targeted at k-12 students, teachers and communities. Utilizing the strengths of three main educational outreach institutions in Alaska, the Challenger Learning Center of Alaska partnered with the University of Alaska Museum of the North, the Anchorage Museum and UAF researchers to build a strategic and long lasting partnership between STEM formal and informal education providers to promote STEM literacy and awareness of NASA’s mission. Specific Goals of the project include: 1) Engaging and inspiring the public through presentation of relevant, compelling stories of research and adventure in the Arctic; 2) strengthening the pipeline of k-12 students into STEM careers, particularly those from underserved groups; 3) increasing interest in science among children and their parents; 4) increasing awareness of NASA’s role in climate change research; and 5) strengthening connections between UAF researchers, rural Alaska, and Alaska’s informal science education institutions. Each institution chose communities with whom they had prior relationships and/or made logistical sense. Through discussions analyzing partner strengths, tasks were divided; the Challenger Center taking on the role of k-12 curriculum development, the Museum of the North creating animations with data pulled from UAF research, to be shown on both in-house and traveling spherical display systems and the Anchorage Museum creating table top displays for use in community science nights. Each developed element was used while visiting the identified communities both in the classroom environment and during the community science nights.
This article presents extracurricular lesson plans and activities about sound propagation and acoustic communication. The activities were developed by STEM researchers. They align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and are designed for fourth-grade students.
This study focuses on the combined role of zoos and an out-of-school-time program focused on environmental issues in influencing children’s relationship with and sense of responsibility toward animals and the environment.
By emphasizing work-based learning, youth programs can not only meet their youth development goals but also prepare young people for success in the knowledge economy of the 21st century.
Youth Action Crews map the youth development programs and places in their neighborhoods in order to raise public awareness of the opportunities—and of where such opportunities don’t exist.
This article describes Youth as Resources, a nationwide initiative involves youth and adults as equal partners in projects that improve community life. Some examples of the projects include the Rural Renewable Energy Alliance, which engages teenagers to install solar heating in low income homes, and the Haydenville Preservation Committee, which implemented neighborhood cleanup and landscaping projects in rural Ohio.
This study investigated the ways in which the Science Mentoring Project, an afterschool program with a youth development focus and mentoring component, helped fifth-grade participants develop key competencies in five areas: personal, social, cognitive, creative, and civic competencies. Development of these competencies, in turn, positively affected participants’ school experiences. Using program observations, teacher interviews, student surveys, a student focus group, and mentor feedback forms, researchers studied how—not just whether—the project’s youth development activities affected school
This article explores the partnership between the Baltimore County 4-H program and the Baltimore County Public Library, which forged a partnership to offer structured experiential programming opportunities to meet the afterschool needs of youth who visit their local library. Their experience suggests that libraries and youth development organizations can fruitfully collaborate to create sustainable quality afterschool programming.
This paper advocates for place-based education to guide research and design for mobile computers used in outdoor informal environments (e.g., backyards, nature centers and parks). By bringing together research on place-based education with research on location awareness, we developed three design guidelines to support learners to develop robust science-related understandings within local communities. The three empirically- derived design guidelines are: (1) Facilitate participation in disciplinary conversations and practices within personally-relevant places, (2) Amplifying observations to see