Promoting Understanding of Climate Change With Technology-Enhanced Graphing Activities

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: Technology-Based Learning Environments for STEM Education

Abstract

In this design-based research study we describe the development of a curriculum unit to address complex ideas about climate change. We focus on activities with complex graphs depicting noisy data and describe student challenges understanding trends in these data. We describe how initial findings about student difficulties were utilized for further curriculum development by incorporating “curve-fitting” activities. In a second iteration we describe the co-development of a teacher-led discussion activity to address students’ persistent difficulties linking trends between graphs. In comparison to an equivalent group without this discussion activity, students who participated in the discussion activity were more likely to recognize a lack of relationship between two variables commonly, and incorrectly, associated in climate change (ozone depletion and global temperature).

Authors

• Jonathan Michael Vitale, University of California - Berkeley

• Elizabeth McBride, University of California - Berkeley

• Marcia Linn, University of California - Berkeley