SCALE currently supports three cross-institutional collaborations. Each of these projects began work following the SCALE workshop in June 2001, and will continue into 2002.
This research project seeks to understand how the assessments created individually by our multiple SCALE partners for use in their own water quality education efforts can be more efficiently and effectively shared across our varied sites, given the important differences in our audiences and our instructional environments. We hope to gather specific examples of how different assessment items can elicit different student responses depending on the context in which the curriculum takes place.
A major focus of past water quality summits was the sharing of curriculum projects, design principles and technologies. Many of these projects possessed several similarities, including the collection, manipulation and analysis of data, contextualizing elements, and visualization and modeling technologies. Similarly, symposiums organized for AERA and NARST in 2000 provided opportunities for the water quality summit partners to share research concerning the development, enactment and refinement of their respective curriculum.
One natural step for the continued growth of this synergistic community is the joint development of a water quality curriculum project. This project plans to construct a water quality curriculum project that leverages the expertise, tools, and curriculum frameworks previously shared by members of the water quality summit community. The construction team will consist of a broad spectrum of curriculum developers and teachers, including developers associated with WISE, LeTUS, WOW, and GeeWis).
This project will design an activity-design framework and a series of best practice exemplars of water quality curricular activities. This framework will serve as a general model for customization of any inquiry-based water quality curricula, and will initially be used with teachers and developers in curricular customization in association with SCALE workshops. Our collaboration intends to develop a systematic methodology to document and compare customization efforts. The emerging framework will complement and inform the development of the two other collaborative SCALE projects described here. Throughout the project period, we will consult with SCALE staff in gathering information about curricular resources and the customization efforts that support a meta-analysis by SCALE of the nature of customization. We anticipate that the framework to be developed would be a useful tool for the community of SCALE as well as for a larger community of water-quality curriculum-designers and implementers.