When Farzad Mahootian came to Gonzaga College High School to teach chemistry in 1990 he soon became frustrated with traditional teaching methods. "On a regular basis, science classes require extreme passivity," he explains. "Taking students on occasional field trips or showing them videotapes in an effort to make the class more active is a bunch of nonsense."
Four years later, instead of listening to lectures and reading textbooks, 12 students at the Washington, DC, school are learning science by becoming scientists.
The framework for their approach is the relatively new field of Earth system science, after which Mahootian and co-teacher Michael Keeler's course is named. Taking NASA's Mission to Planet Earth as a model, Gonzaga students in grades 10 through 12 are studying the Earth as a system composed of interrelated subsystems.
Much like university and laboratory researchers, the students work in teams, in this case three teams of four. They complete seven projects in the year-long course. The first and last projects are short, 3 weeks or so, while the others last 4 to 6 weeks. The students rotate through various responsibilities, including project management.
The teams explore relationships between Earth subsystems by considering specific phenomena. For instance, one team looked at the atmosphere and hydrosphere by probing the significance of El Niño to ocean dynamics. Another studied the biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere by determining if there is a connection among the distribution of phytoplankton, water temperature, and cloud formation.
"They begin with background readings and then get together and discuss them," says Mahootian. "The teams formulate hypotheses and come up with a model for the phenomenon they are studying. After that, they present a background report that includes their research, an hypothesis, a model, and a strategy for how they will test the hypothesis."
"They then repeat the process and make it specific to their hypothesis," Mahootian continues. "They look for data to test the hypothesis. They go from a qualitative model to a quantitative model."
The Gonzaga students employ a suite of computational tools in these endeavors. Their hardware consists of four Apple Macintosh Centris computers and a Silicon Graphics Indigo workstation. The software includes STELLA II for dynamic systems modeling and NCSA Image and NCSA Collage for data visualization and analysis. A grant from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's High Performance Computing and Communications Project provided for these resources and release time for Mahootian and Keeler.
Real-world data are collected from a variety of sources to either be incorporated into or compared against the models. Gopher, NCSA Mosaic, and CD-ROMs are used to find the data. NASA Science Internet installed a T1 line for Internet access.
The last step in the projects is a scientific report, which includes an oral presentation and a hypermedia document. Many of the reports are published on the Earth System Science Community Curriculum World Wide Web (WWW) server. The public can access this information using a WWW reader such as NCSA Mosaic using the following URL: http://www.circles.org/.
Grades are determined by performance (65 percent) and work quality (35 percent). The performance grade is divided into 35 percent for team performance and 30 percent for individual student performance. Team work thus accounts for 70 percent of the grade.
The students in the Earth system science class have all taken science and mathematics before-at least biology and algebra-but as Peter Pollak, grade 10, explains, "This is a very non-standard and very unstructured class. It is a jolt from the reality of what school work was."
Mahootian emphasizes that the course was designed that way. "There's a disparity between what they do in school and what is expected of them in the work world. Having them do research here and having the frustrations of doing research and of working in a team-that is congruent with what they face in the workplace."
Indeed, despite some reservations about the unexpected workload and time commitment, Pollak agrees with this assertion: "You can get a real idea of how scientific teams and projects will work if you ever go into the field . . ." he says. "We're making the same kinds of hypotheses as other scientists."
Another aspect of the course that students value is its interdisciplinary nature. "Personally, I've learned more in here than in another subject," says Nate Avery, grade 12. "It's interdisciplinary; in order to understand what you're doing, you have to have a grasp on different subjects."
Avery has such a grasp, having taken many of Gonzaga's science courses, including biology, chemistry, physics, and three computer science classes. For the past two summers, he has worked at NASA Goddard in its Summer High School Research Apprenticeship Program. This fall, he starts the engineering program at the University of Maryland at College Park.
"In a way, I regret graduating. I'd like to see how this course is next year," Avery says. "When I came into it, Dr. Mahootian and others didn't know how it would progress. I'm wondering how freedoms will be restricted. I'm wondering if the purity of it will remain."
Next year, Gonzaga will offer an advanced class in ecological economics. About one-half of the current students are interested in the new independent study course.
But Mahootian and Keeler also want to build on the Gonzaga experience and form a community of high schools and universities developing a "network-enabled, research-oriented Earth system science curriculum," Keeler says.
By curriculum, Keeler stresses they don't mean just content "but a system of human processes." This system would include "the design and organization of human communications, technology applications, and human interactions with resources and tools," he says.
To this end, the teachers are organizing members of CIRCLES, the Consortium for International Research Collaboration and Learning about the Earth System. The consortium's goal is to make such a curriculum adaptable by any school with the proper computing facilities in about 3 years. CIRCLES has submitted proposals to NASA and the National Science Foundation to fund such work.
Mahootian says that "as we scale up to a larger national base, we hope to attain some measure of self-sustainability," which Keeler defines as a new culture. "This is a way for them [the students] to create culture and to produce sound scientific findings," he says. "It is a quality control environment in which they are the police and the citizens."