Earth Day 2021: Improving our planet one ITEST project at a time

The Detroit Public Schools will collaborate with the Belle Island Aquarium to develop a field-trip program that will enrich learning in biology, with cross-curricular impacts on chemistry, physics, business, literacy and the arts.

This project investigates the relationship between middle school students’ information technology skills, their success in an inquiry ocean science curriculum designed to target those skills, and their understanding of the new characteristics of 21st century science. It is concerned with the design of a curriculum and its impact on students of high compared with low digital literacy.

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase student motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by developing and testing a middle school science curriculum focusing on water and water-related career awareness.

This project will engage students, educators, elders, informal educators, natural resource professionals, and parents in community dialogues and relationship building, informal-formal professional development collaborations, and indigenized STEM learning experiences and mentoring for students in grades 8-12.

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 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.

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.

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.