The Earth System Science Community (ESSC) is a unique collaboration of educators, students, and scientists who are refining an investigation-oriented Earth system science curriculum -- and enabling high school and university students to research the Earth system using data and information via the Internet.
With ESSC, students and educators learn how to investigate the Earth as a system using the appropriate scientific data, tools, and techniques. Students also learn how to evaluate and publish the results of their team research on the Web. And because Earth system science is inherently cross-disciplinary, the materials, tools, teaching resources, and examples of student research -- all available from ESSC's Web site -- may be used to supplement existing curricula in Earth and environmental science, physics, chemistry, and beyond.
Educational strategy
In their effort to create a high school curriculum for Earth system science, the founders of ESSC's Web site recognized that conventional methods and tools by which science has been taught in the classroom, such as lectures and textbooks, and the methods and tools by which science is really practiced, are largely incongruent. There is a discontinuity between how students are supposed to learn in the classroom and how they are expected to work and communicate in their professional communities. In many ways, this discontinuity characterizes the systemic problems in science education today.
Earth system science (ESS) is a holistic approach to the study of the Earth that stresses the investigations of the interactions among the Earth's components in order to explain Earth dynamics, evolution, and global change. The challenge to Earth system science is to develop the capability to understand the changes that will occur in the next decade to century, both naturally and in response to human activity.
From the ESSC homepage, visitors are able to review curriculum materials, including projects, syllabi, educational strategies, and student reports. (All ESSC curricula are research-oriented and collaborative. Student teams investigate global change topics from an Earth system perspective. Students work with teachers and scientists to do original investigations and report their findings.) Visitors may also download data and other resources, check out educational services offered by ESSC, and learn more about the project.
Objectives
ESSC's objective is to provide ongoing collaboration, professional development, and problem solving in order to:
- enable students and teachers to investigate the Earth system;
- develop a collective understanding of the Earth system;
- enable students to learn process thinking, scientific method, collaborative problem solving, model building, and scientific communication; and
- develop an Earth system science curriculum and support system over the Internet.
This Project is no longer funded, and is currently an archive.
In May 1993, ECOlogic Corporation of Washington, DC, was awarded a contract by NASA's Space Data and Computing Division through the High Performance Computing and Communications program. Under that two-year contract, ECOlogic worked closely with NASA scientists and staff to develop ECOlogica, a multimedia Earth system science curriculum using NASA computational resources delivered over the Internet.
Curator: Randolph Kim
Responsible NASA Official: Mark
Leon
Last Updated: 07/02/2002
