7.2 Issues Raised by Classroom Experiences
While the GEV represented a breakthrough in the number of schools who used it,
observations and reports of use still raised important concerns about motivation,
accessibility, background knowledge, and practical constraints.
7.2.1 Motivation
The Global Warming Conference curriculum was intended to provide a motivating
context for learning about climate based on concern over the implications of global
climate change. This context was designed to motivate not just the visualization
activities using the GEV, but also the other structured investigations involving data,
graphing software, modeling software, and hands-on laboratory experiments. In practice,
we found that teachers struggled to present the curriculum to their students as a coherent
whole. In several cases, teachers chose to focus on the structured investigations, treating
them like a traditional curriculum unit organized around a topic, not a controversy. Other
teachers chose to focus on the societal implications and de-emphasized the inquiry
activities and the climate science. Only a handful of teachers actually conducted a mock
conference, and those that did found it difficult to connect the science content to the
social, economic, and political issues that were the subject of the conference. While
teachers responded quite favorably to the curriculum, and most who conducted it in 1996
repeated it in 1997, their positive feedback was based on individual activities that they
found valuable, rather than the overall motivating structure. Based on these results, we
decided that global warming was, in fact, a motivating context but that the curriculum
had to be more carefully constructed to align the science investigations with the
culminating activity.