COMMUNICATING THE SCIENCE OF GLOBAL CHANGE: A NEW WEB RESOURCE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PALEONTOLOGY

Museums fill important roles in raising awareness of and fostering good communication about science. The University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) has embraced this role through the development of two award-winning, educational websites, Understanding Evolution and Understanding Science (www.understandingevolution.org; www.understandingscience.org). Now, the UCMP, together with the National Center for Science Education, will build on those successes with a new web resource, Understanding Global Change (UGC). This site will provide vetted scientific content, teaching resources, and strategies for K-16 educators to effectively incorporate the complex—but critically important—topic of global change science into their existing curricula. The UGC project broadly defines global change as the varied ways in which Earth’s natural systems change over time and will focus on the science behind global change, the many scientific disciplines bearing on past and current global change, and interactions and feedbacks among climate systems.

The project’s initial steps took place in 2012 with meetings of our scientific and educational advisory boards. To further hone the project’s objectives, the UGC project team and BSCS administered a needs assessment to more than 1500 educators. This survey revealed (1) a desire for professional development on global change topics, (2) a strong interest in the human impact of global change and its social implications, and (3) a high level of perceived relevance of global change to students’ everyday lives.

From both scientific and sociological perspectives, global change is a complex subject but an appropriate one for our times. This cross-disciplinary field bears on Earth’s past and rapidly-changing present state, which are essential topics for an informed citizenry to grasp. Furthermore, from an educational perspective, scientific principles relevant to global change and the interactions and feedbacks within a dynamic system are critical subjects for scientific literacy and are identified as both core ideas and cross-cutting concepts within the Next Generation of Science Standards. The UGC website will launch in 2015.