HR: 10:35h
AN: ED42A-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Climate Change Science Instruction using a Model: Students Asking Quantitative Questions
AU: * Gautier, C
EM: gautier@icess.ucsb.edu
AF: Geography Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93016 United States
AB: The act of asking a question is arguably the most important part of the scientific process as it is the starting point of the scientific inquiry. And while students learn much from asking questions, they are often reticent to do so in the class-room and more often than not the instructor asks the questions while the students answer them. Here we present results from an investigation of quantitative scientific questions asked by students in an undergraduate course about climate change science about one of the main processes driving climate and climate change: radiative forcing. This course is an inquiry-based course in which questions are explicitly solicited from students in different forms. One topic of relevance to the concept of radiative forcing (effects of clouds, greenhouse gases, aerosols and land-use changes on climate) is studied each week. Students, after much preparation and scaffolding, must produce a research-level question that can be addressed by an up-to-date, accurate radiative transfer model with which they have become familiar at the beginning of the course. Students must then run, analyze and present results from an experiment they design for the model to address their scientific question. Our presentation will address how the nature of students' questions evolved over the six weeks dedicated to the applications of the radiative forcing concept, based on weekly submitted individual questions and group's question. Our analysis will look at both individual and class asking-question characteristics. We will analyze the relationships between the individual questions and the quality of group's question and look at the influence of group dynamics on the nature and quality of the groups' questions.
UR: http://www.crseo.ucsb.edu/esrg/Geog134_S04/Geog134_Index.html
DE: 1610 Atmosphere (0315, 0325)
DE: 0850 Geoscience education research
SC: Education and Human Resourcese [ED]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting