Earth Day 2020

This project will use the oral tradition of storytelling to empower Native American students (middle school, high school and college) to engage in environmental decision-making and scientific communication, while building a stronger sense of their ethnic identity.

Middle and high school students from low-income backgrounds and other groups underrepresented in STEM fields will participate in a summer program and a school-year program to produce videos documenting the effects of environmental changes on their lives and communities.

Over 70 teachers, 1800 high school students and 900 middle school students in urban and suburban RI and CT districts during the course of the program will interact with cutting edge research technologies related to exploring the global ocean.

This project will build on high school Alaskan girls' general interest in biology and the natural environment to develop new interests in areas such as ecosystem dynamics, geophysical dynamics, and use of technologies, such as remote sensing.

The project is designed to develop, implement and assess an educational model intended to improve Native American student science identity through culturally relevant use of technology that can directly improve the well being of their communities. The project will engage 90 low-income, high school Native American students from the rural Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho through a program of educational activities centered on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and remote sensing.

The Middle Schoolers Out to Save the World (MSOSW) curriculum uses data gathered by students to develop optimum scenarios for conserving energy and reducing the global production of greenhouse gases.

The Arctic Climate Modeling Program (ACMP) offered yearlong science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professional development to teachers in rural Alaska. Teacher training focused on introducing youth to workforce technologies used in Arctic research. Due to challenges in making professional development accessible to rural teachers, ACMP modified the traditional ITEST format, instead offering unique “curriculum resource-based professional development” that provided a year-round mix of training options for 165 teachers.

Socio-environmental science investigations (SESI) are a series of secondary level geospatial investigations that focus on social issues related to environmental science. The investigations focus on local problems and utilize fieldwork to gather data in a local setting. Students use the Esri Collector app to gather geo-referenced data outside their school. The student-collected data is then shared into a Cloud-based map service over the Internet.

Many barriers exist to K–12 classroom teachers’ adoption and implementation of geospatial technologies with their students. To address this circumstance, we have developed and implemented a geospatial curriculum approach to promote teachers’ professional growth with curriculum-linked professional development (PD) to support the adoption of socio-environmental science investigations (SESI) in an urban school environment that includes reluctant learners.

Disconnection from the natural world may be contributing to our planet's destruction. The authors propose a new construct, Nature Relatedness (NR), and a scale that assesses the affective, cognitive, and experiential aspects of individuals' connection to nature. In Study 1, the authors explored the internal structure of the NR item responses in a sample of 831 participants using factor analysis. They tested the construct validity of NR with respect to an assortment of environmental and personality measures.

Research suggests that an ecologically informed sense of place, including strong place attachment and ecological place meaning, contributes to pro-environmental behaviors. Yet it is unclear whether an intervention such as environmental education can intentionally influence sense of place, especially in cities. To investigate the impact of urban environmental education programs on sense of place, we used pre/post surveys of youth in 5-week environmental and non-environmental summer youth programs in the Bronx, New York City, in 2010.

Twenty-five seventh and eighth grade teachers and 150 of their students in Maine engage in computer modeling, simple programming and analysis of GIS data coupled with hands-on field experiences in ecology.

Geospatial technologies have emerged over the last 15 years as one of the key tools used by environmental scientists (NRC 2006). In fact, educators have recognized that coupling geospatial technologies with environmental science topics and scientific datasets opens the door to local and regional scientific investigations (McInerney 2006). Over the last three years, we have been working to provide tools, curriculum, and resources that allow students to learn science through authentic inquiries using their own scientific data.

Watch these three videos made by ITEST project GreenTECH!  These videos give you insight into environmental engineering.  In the first video, meet Adam, a mechanical engineer who works in an NYC power plant.  The second video features Team Reakter, a team of green battery experts.  Finally, the last video features Levi and Ozgem, two energy activists, who will show you how to get your community excited about saving energy.