This award is being used to convene an invitation-only, 2.5 day workshop to define student collaborative climate science research. The goal of the workshop, which is being jointly sponsored by NSF/GEO and NOAA, is to produce specific guidance for engaging students, teachers, and scientists in collaborative research about Earth's changing climate, one of the major science topics for the 21st century. Participants will include climate scientists, STEM education researchers, and STEM education practitioners who have experience with implementing authentic student research in formal and informal learning settings. Specific objectives include: 1) defining what it means for students, educators, and scientists to conduct collaborative climate science research and examine the role of student climate-related research in high-quality science education; 2) defining climate-related research areas that are of interest to the climate science community and that can be conducted by students and their teachers, in collaboration with scientists; and, 3) defining within promising research areas specific collaborative research projects in sufficient detail to guide development of implementation plans for data collection, reporting, analysis, and dissemination.
The Workshop to Define Collaborative Student Climate Research, organized by the Institute for Earth Science Research and Education, was held on November 17-19, 2010. The workshop was based on the observation that today's brightest secondary school students are not participating in climate science research, although this is a fundamental research topic for the 21st century. The workshop had three goals: 1. To define what it means for students, teachers, and scientists to engage in authentic climate-related research that passes a "scientific interest" test in which scientists and others have a stake in the results of the research; 2. To provide guidelines for designing and implementing projects in which students, teachers, and scientists can collaborate to conduct climate-related research that has both pedagogical and scientific value; 3. To identify some specific climate science research projects that can be undertaken collaboratively by students, teachers, and scientists. The workshop defined several specific student research projects that constitute authentic research and meet the "scientific interest" criterion, in areas such as Earth's radiative balance, atmospheric science, and the global carbon cycle. The workshop's approach to collaborative projects involving scientists, teachers, and students, is currently being employed in the NASA-funded Climate Science Research for Educators and Students project (CSRES). Climate-related research project ideas, with suggestions for implementation, are prepared by scientists. Then scientists, teachers, and students work collaboratively to develop a concrete research plan, using existing data and/or new data collected with instrumentation provided by CSRES, some of which teachers and students can build themselves. Workshop guidelines developed during the workshop for student climate research apply to other areas of science as well. In particular, the strong distinctions the workshop drew between "research" and other kinds of student activities are important for directing student research in any science area.
