A recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has drawn renewed attention to the dire consequences of ongoing human-made climate change. Without a substantial reduction of global carbon emissions, the group warns, the effect of climate change to human and natural communities will inevitably, and catastrophically, worsen.
With ocean levels rising, droughts intensifying, and food security eroding, researchers and educators at The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) are turning their focus to some of the most critical players in mitigating the effects of climate change and creating a more sustainable energy future: U.S. middle school, high school and college students.
“Today’s students face a future in which they will be required to create or evaluate solutions for reducing human impact on the environment,” says Charles Anderson, GLBRC researcher and professor of teacher education at Michigan State University. “What we want to know is how prepared are they for the task and what can we do to prepare them.”
In a recent study done by Anderson, GLBRC colleague Elizabeth de los Santos, and graduate student Sarah Riggs Stapleton, the group conducted semi-structured interviews with nine middle school, fourteen high school, and ten college students designed to understand their ideas and reasoning about transportation fuels.
The research group asked students to evaluate and compare the sustainability of cars powered by gasoline, electricity, and ethanol in order to determine the extent to which the students showed awareness of environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability. Which of these three factors did students include when judging the merits of the different fuel production systems?
Anderson and colleagues determined that high-level student responses demonstrated 1) knowledge of product life cycles (i.e., the matter and energy transformations associated with the production and use of fuel commodities); 2) the ability to compare costs and benefits of different systems in order to make value judgments on sustainability; and 3) the ability to reason on global, long-term scales as well as human, short-term scales.
While a small fraction of the students gave these high-level responses, the majority of students had an incomplete picture of the different production systems.
Students giving intermediate-level responses traced the steps of production for a fuel but did not focus methodically on how matter and energy move through the system; made judgments based on a single attribute of a system (i.e., choosing the fuel that was environmentally the best without considering its social and economic factors); and reasoned at local, short-term scales.
Low-level responses from students featured a limited understanding of production systems (not knowing, for example, where fossil fuels such as gasoline come from); general value-laden associations with one fuel or the other (e.g. favoring ethanol because it’s “natural”); and reasoning at a personal scale (i.e., considering effects for individuals rather than for production systems).
The researchers also found that even top-level students failed to pose questions about total demand—the infrastructure required, or impacts of, switching all gasoline-fueled cars to electricity or using all the nation’s corn for ethanol.
“We found that student understanding of product life cycles is especially gray,” says Joyce Parker, assistant professor of geological sciences and GLBRC education researcher. “Generally speaking, students do not know how fuels are produced or where they come from. In the end, only high-level students were able to reach evidence-based conclusions about fuel sustainability.”
“But the most important thing,” Anderson notes, “isn’t that the students definitely determine which fuel is the most sustainable. The most important thing is that they learn what questions need to be asked.”
“Knowing which questions to ask” is also one of the emphases of the new Next Generation Science Standards published in April of 2013, a set of K-12 science standards developed by a partnership between the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Achieve, and partner states.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) include performance expectations for practices such as decision-making and engineering design. According to the standards, for example, high school students should be capable of “[evaluating or refining] a technological solution that reduces impacts of human activities on natural systems.”
And yet Parker is quick to point out that the NGSS is not a curriculum. Instructional materials aligned with the new standards are just now being developed, and teachers wishing to teach to the standards find themselves without much support.
“Training teachers to teach complex practices such as engineering design without the support of decent curriculum materials is basically impossible.” Anderson adds. “It’s kind of like taking 20th century doctors and putting them in 19th century hospitals. You’ve got to have the tools that go with the training.”
While preparing students for the complex realities of addressing climate change is certainly no small feat, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center is doing its part in terms of applying educational research to its own education and outreach efforts.
GLBRC Education and Outreach Director John Greenler works closely with GLBRC education and biofuels researchers in developing the on-the-ground educational materials his team is also charged with teaching and disseminating. This unique organizational structure means that Greenler’s team is especially well positioned to provide the kind of teaching tools and materials needed to fill in the curriculum of a new and much-needed approach to science education.
“Our goal is to use the real-world problems that form the basis of the Center’s biofuel research to create authentic opportunities for students to make their own evidence-based conclusions about biofuel science and sustainability,” Greenler says.
One way Greenler’s team does this is by developing and making widely available an extensive portfolio of classroom materials that help students gain a fuller understanding of the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of biofuel systems.
GLBRC’s Education and Outreach group also provides professional development opportunities for teachers, organizing a >Bioenergy Institute for Educators and a Research Experience for Teachers program in which teachers learn first hand about the Center’s research in order to adapt contemporary, cutting-edge research to inquiry-based materials or classroom activities for their own classrooms.
“The good news,” Greenler says, “is that students are keen on becoming problem solvers for today’s pressing global energy challenges. By providing them with educational experiences that match their knowledge base and ways of learning, they really can be a part of the solution, whether they go on to be a scientist, engineer, a skilled member of our workforce or just an engaged member of our country’s citizenry.”
Anderson and Parker’s research and Greenler’s education and outreach are funded by The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), one of three Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Centers created to make transformational breakthroughs that will form the foundation of new cellulosic biofuels technology.