GLOBE News
Community Blog: “A Global Perspective” – Data Collection and Scientific Understanding
Are you keeping up with GLOBE Community Blogs? If you’re a teacher seeking to provide your students with the opportunity to collect, share, and analyze data as an effective way to help them develop a deeper understanding of scientific concepts, then you’ll want to read a recent blog posted by Jeff Bouwman, a GLOBE teacher at Shumate Middle School (Gilbralter, Michigan, USA).
Bouwman was recently published in the National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) April/May 2018 edition of Science and Children. Together with Dr. Stein Brunvand (Associate Dean, University of Michigan/Dearborn, College of Education, Health, and Human Services), Bouwman wrote an article entitled, “A Global Perspective.” The article details a science project that involved fifth graders collecting data on soil samples for NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) campaign using GLOBE’s pedosphere protocol.
The article describes the inquiry-based steps the students engaged in during their work collecting, processing, and analyzing soil samples – and how they worked with the data they collected. In conclusion, Bowman and Stein state that “projects such as GLOBE can be effective ways to teach science by allowing students to be scientists while working with relevant data to explore real-world problems.”
“While this article focuses specifically on the 2014-2015 school year,” Bouwman and Stein state in the article, “we have continued to engage in data collection and submitted over 67,000 data measurements to the various citizen science projects hosted by The GLOBE Program.” Currently, Bouwman’s students are contributing data measurements for the Phase III GLOBE ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) Student Research Campaign.
To read the blog, including the full article, click here.
To read other insightful blogs on community-related topics (the Community Blog), click here! (And, remember, as a vital part of the GLOBE community, we want to hear from you. On the Community Blog, you can respectfully voice your opinion, ask questions, share tips and tidbits – and make meaningful connections with members of the GLOBE community. The GLOBE Community Support Team has recorded a demonstration video on how to create a blog post. To view the video, click here.)
type: globe-newsNews origin: GLOBE Implementation Office