Rachel

One of the biggest challenges for me is the varying starting levels of the students. Within one classroom there will be students that are really advanced and age 17 and students that are 13 and  way behind grade level.  I try and meet the students where they are at using a basic formative assessment and provide a lot of background information and present the directions one step at a time and reiterate everything that I say.  I usually pair up the students so that they can work together to problem solve. I usually don't meet with students very many times so many of my project are shorter in duration and a lot of the follow up falls on the actual classroom teacher.

I spent time looking into the data for eBird. I have entered data into eBird in the past but I have never tried to download any of the data before. The raw data sets are overwhelmingly large and you need R software to manipulate the data properly. I think R is too advanced for even high school students so I am not how I can use this raw data with my students.  I think that working with a smaller citizen science project that has smaller manageable data sets could be very beneficial to students. If the students could access the data from ebird their is an endless amount of questions they could ask using the data because there is so much data available. Someone that has not participated in the project can use the data and students could theoretically access the data but there are some barriers it seems to being able to use the raw data at student level rather than for a professional researcher/scientist. However, there is access to sighting data, maps and bar charts  in formats that are easily available to students.

I completed a fish seine July 15th, to collect data on forage fish populations in partnership with a local nature center. The nature center takes out groups all the time to do these fish seines and collect data. I work with adjudicated youth so they are in the program year around, so I was able to do this with 3 students and 4 staff. The students thought it was interesting and fun and learned how to use an identification guide and how to use measure fish in addition to why forage fish are so important. The water and mucky beach were a bit of a challenge but we had waders for all the students. Another challenge was lack of fish. I have done this activity awhile ago and we caught 36 fish and this time we only caught 7 (doing it twice). We are hypothesizing that many fish died during the huge unprecedented heat wave at the end of June.

The most impactful thing for me was just actually taking the time to stop and listen to all the sounds. We don't take much time to sit still and be silent usually. I think you could encourage students to observe more carefully by giving them some examples and prompts of things they might be listening for before they start.

I think I model all three practices which are "sharing findings with outside audiences, youth taking ownership of data quality, and interacting with complex social ecological systems." When I take students out water quality monitoring they are responsible for the quality of the data, have to run the tests repeatedly to make sure they are at least precise in their answers, work as a group to make sure they aren't making large mistakes in the process to get good results and then go out and do the testing again a few months later and compare their results to their previous results. They are then invited to a large conference like gathering to share their data with local environmental professionals and students from other schools. I also frame every science issue as part of a bigger complex social ecological system and make sure that the students understand that everything is related.

My watershed education program is heavily centered around water quality monitoring, specifically looking at whether the site is healthy salmon habitat. All of my classes go out to a site to monitor the water twice a year.  This activity appears to be structured inquiry. The students are given different parameters to test and the appropriate testing kits. The students carry out the investigation following the directions  and using the tests that are given. Then the students find out if the water quality is good or bad for salmon based on known water quality ranges. They then share their results with their classmates and have discussions on what could potentially be affecting the water quality and ways that they could improve water quality at their site. Some science practices that students develop through these activities are analyzing and interpreting data, constructing an explanation and designing a solution. Teachers could modify the lessons to make them more inquiry based by letting the students research what water quality issues affect salmon in advance and let them decide what issues they want to test for and how they want to test for those water quality parameters which would give them more experience in asking questions and defining problems as well as planning and carrying out investigations,