Eighty six percent of global evaporation and seventy eight percent of global precipitation occur over the oceans. Sea surface salinity is a key variable in understanding how fresh water input and output affect ocean dynamics and provide a better understanding of ocean-atmosphere interactions linking the water cycle, ocean circulation and climate variability. The Aquarius instrument is measuring this much-needed variable.
COSEE NOW is dedicated to supporting ocean scientists in successfully communicating the broader impacts (BI) of their research. We have created a suite of new online resources for scientists, which compliments and enhances our existing social networking portal that brings together researchers and educators from the ocean science community.
The North Atlantic Bloom (NAB) webinar series features the research of scientists from the 2008 NAB Experiment and focuses on key concepts in ocean science. The NAB scientists partnered with COSEE-Ocean Systems to produce the series, which includes multiple interactive concept maps, an integrated set of activities based on actual cruise data, and comprehensive presentations that upon one another for a final, cohesive program.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) will reshape the way ocean science is conducted. Recent advances in the delivery of web-based education, and use of visualization technology and data visualization tools in educational contexts, have led to the development of on-line platforms for instruction that engages students in active scientific inquiry by collecting and analyzing data of real world phenomena.
The Aquarius mission is brimming with educational content that hits all four areas of STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The design and engineering of the satellite, the science of ocean observing, the technical specifications for the mission and the importance of understanding global processes through data can all be illustrated using Aquarius as an example.
In this poster, NASA’s education and outreach team illustrates their multi-pronged approach to creating educational products and opportunities for educators to utilize information and data about Aquarius.
Four COSEE Centers - Ocean Systems, West, Networked Ocean World, and California - held concept mapping collaborative workshops to help scientists mentor graduate students to improve their teaching and research. Formative and summative evaluation results indicate that the workshops promoted more peer to peer interactions between faculty and graduate students and more familiarity with Ocean Literacy and Climate Literacy principles.
Want to make salinity and its connections to the water cycle, ocean circulation and climate come alive for your students? NASA Aquarius Education and Public Outreach has teamed up with COSEE-OS to conduct three public and four educator-focused webinars, as well as a pre-launch workshop at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The 2008 North Atlantic Bloom Experiment (NAB08) was a collaborative effort to observe an entire phytoplankton spring bloom. To broadly disseminate results and contribute to the public’s understanding of ocean science, NAB08 participants collaborated with COSEE-OS to present a series of five webinars describing the motivations and findings of this multidisciplinary experiment.
COSEE-OS External Evaluator Dr. Ted Repa, representing four COSEE Centers (California, NOW, Ocean Systems and West), shared end-of-workshop evaluations from the Faculty/Graduate Student Collaborative workshop series conducted by these Centers in 2010 and 2011 at the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting.
The Aquarius mission is brimming with educational content that hits all four areas of STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This poster, presented at the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting, summarizes available educational products and opportunities.
With 14 Centers and a National COSEE Office located throughout the United States, each Center is a consortium of one or more ocean science research institutions, informal science education organizations, and formal education entities. The COSEE program is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Academic scientists have a number of avenues through which they can participate in education and outreach (E/O) programs to address the mandate for broader impacts. During this presentation, the authors presented one scientist’s perspective on the advantages and limitations of different modes of E/O and included specific examples from the past three years of working with COSEE-Ocean Systems.
In many educator professional development workshops, scientists present content in a slideshow-type format and field questions afterwards. Drawbacks of this approach include: inability to begin the lecture with content that is responsive to audience needs; lack of flexible access to specific material within the linear presentation; and “Q&A” sessions are not easily scalable to broader audiences. Often this type of traditional interaction provides little direct benefit to the scientists.
The Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence - Ocean Systems (COSEE-OS) applies the technique of concept mapping with demonstrated effectiveness in helping scientists and educators “get on the same page” (deCharon et al., 2009). A key aspect is scientist professional development geared towards improving face-to-face and online communication with non-scientists. COSEE-OS promotes scientist-educator collaboration, tests the application of scientist-educator maps in new contexts through webinars, and is piloting the expansion of maps as long-lived resources for the broader community.
Discover a powerful visual tool to help your students and audiences– no matter where they live - improve their understanding of ocean and climate interactions. COSEE-OS has developed a suite of interactive multimedia tools that illustrate clear connections among and within the ocean, earth, and solar systems.
Last March, Amy Holt Cline of COSEE-OS and UNH, along with Perrin Chick of the Seacoast Science Center in Rye, NH and Author/Illustrator Karen Romano Young, presented the connections between art and ocean science using COSEE-OS online tools. This presentation included background on why art and science are naturally connected and should be taught together to help create more innovative and creative thinkers.
Before the presentation, questions were sent to the National Marine Education List Serve, called Scuttlebutt, to find out what ways educators have been using art to teach marine science topics in their classrooms or work places. Over fifty responses were collected and were assembled into a concept map. The map is interactive in that a description of the text is found when the cursor rolls over each circle to learn more.
In response to interest from graduate students and research faculty, COSEE-OS has adapted its “scientist-educator collaborative” workshop model to focus on graduate student professional development, and on opening new lines of communication between faculty and graduate students.
The Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE) is a national network with the collective mission to engage scientists and educators and transform ocean science education. The network is comprised of twelve centers that are either regional or thematci in focus. As a thematic center, COSEE Ocean Sytems has worked to create and develop a suite of interactive tools that can be used to enhance ocean and climate literacy by emphasizing the connections between the ocean and the Earth's climate system.
In two linked applications - The Ocean Climate Interactive (OCI) and the Concept Map Builder (CMB) - concept mapping is used as a foundation for learners to make connections between fundamental concepts in ocean and climate science. These cost-free online tools have been incrementally developed, tested, and refined through a series of teacher/scientist professional development workshops to maximize their efficacy.
Graduate students often enter marine sciences with disparate backgrounds and experiences. Understanding biological oceanography, because of multiple interactions among organisms and with the environment, can be daunting to new graduate students. We use concept mapping as a tool to allow students to better integrate information and turn it into knowledge by explicitly visualizing ideas.
Since 2005, COSEE-OS has been creating & testing models of collaboration, particularly with respect to reaching rural and inland audiences, engaging ocean researchers, and creating transferable activities for classroom education. In this presentation, we:
Summarize strides made by COSEE-OS in reaching rural and inland audiences.
Describe how COSEE-OS has increased the capacity of scientists to efficiently translate their research into compelling and relevant content for various audiences by helping them deconstruct knowledge into concepts for construction of concept maps.
Conduct two transferable activities, one from our recent publication "Teaching Physical Concepts in Oceanography: An Inquiry Based Approach" entitled "Effects of Temperature & Salinity on Density & Stratification" and one based on two Science Daily articles illustrating transferability between ocean science content and standard physical science and terrestrial ecological concepts.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" – Chinese Proverb.
Can we teach scientists to "fish" for their audiences from all walks of life, and enjoy the experience so much that they contribute to informal education for a lifetime? Using cutting-edge multimedia tools and a novel workshop model, COSEE-OS is helping scientists better communicate with the public by working with informal science educators.
Error is a given when trying to communicate the relationships among complicated science concepts. Communication research has identified at least 11 sources of error that the scientist needs to minimize: error due to the sender, encoding, the message, the channel of communication, the receiver, decoding, the audience, the physical environment, the social environment, the political and economic environment, and/or time.
COSEE-OS has developed a professional development model for scientists and online tools to minimize these eleven sources of error (not eliminate them because that is not an achievable goal). Particular attention is paid to minimizing the encoding and decoding sources of error through the use of online concept mapping tools which graphically communicate the scientist's logic of how they think, non-linearly, about the relationships among their various concepts of interest.
Concept maps are a useful educational tool to examine the costs and benefits of injury and regeneration, particularly linking the impacts from individuals and ecosystems. Such maps effectively show these linkages and encourage exploration of the processes that control and connect the immediate effects of injury on individual infauna with larger scale habitat and ecosystem changes. Our goal is to expand on the resources that are currently available to middle, high school, and post secondary educators using the COSEE-OS Concept Linked Integrated Media Builder (CLIMB) to create an interactive concept map of how injury affects marine benthic invertebrates, communities, and ecosystems.
To communicate science effectively there are challenges scientsts should consider when trying to craft audience-appropriate messages. The use of concept maps, people as facilitators, and effective teaching strategies can help scientists communicate effectively.
This study looks at challenges which can occur during message packaging and understanding. Specifically it focuses on the use of concept maps as an effective tool for creating audience appropriate packages. Concept mapping allows both specialists and learners to see connections among related concepts. It shows the big picture, while also allowing one to focus in on details. When a learner makes connections between concepts, her/his understanding of the material deepens.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant # NSF OCE-0707385. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
COSEE-Ocean Systems Central Office School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine Darling Marine Center 193 Clark's Cove Road Walpole, ME 04573
Phone: (207) 563-8176 E-mail: cosee-os
