EES faculty, Dr. Dax Soule (Queens) recently published a column in Oceanography: Soule, D. 2020. Project EDDIE: Using real data in science classrooms. Oceanography,33(2).
“How does the earth speak to you? Or, perhaps even more importantly, how do you get the earth to speak to your students? As oceanographers, and more broadly as Earth scientists, we know that our planet has a fascinating story to tell, one that is full of an amazing array of interconnected facets. What language does it speak? How do we connect students to this story under normal educational circumstances? How about in the middle of a pandemic?

If you have found yourself suddenly needing to revise how you teach your classes and are interested in incorporating more open inquiry using real data, I would like to introduce you to Project EDDIE (Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration; funded by the National Science Foundation. (Full disclosure: I am a principal investigator of the project.) Project EDDIE is organized by a community of STEM disciplinary and educational researchers dedicated to providing an onramp for the scaffolded1 analysis of data in the classroom. Participants include faculty from a wide range of STEM disciplines who serve a broad range of student populations at two- and four-year colleges. They create focused lesson plans using EDDIE modules that are designed to be scalable across different skill levels. An “A-B-C” structure based on how students naturally progress through learning objectives of increasing sophistication (Bybee et al., 2006) allows students to develop quantitative skills while making choices about how to use data when addressing aspects of the questions posed. In comparison to a procedure-driven laboratory where we give students questions and tell them how to answer them, EDDIE modules are structured to compel students to ask their own questions and thus become invested in finding the answers through the exploration of a publicly available data set.”

Read more here.