Acadia Learning

The Acadia Learning Program

The goal of the Acadia Learning program is to enable people to make sense of the world that they live in through use of observation and data, paying attention to the context of "place" and the effects of scale and change. We pursue this goal through curriculum development, training for teachers, and education research. The Acadia Learning Program is part of the larger research and education program at Acadia National Park’s Schoodic Education and Research Center (SERC). Consequently, it builds on the scientific work at Acadia and other National Parks, often engaging students and teachers in research that is of interest to the park and to research partners at a variety of colleges and universities.

Other educational programs at SERC and Acadia National Park focus on bringing students to the park, helping teachers make direct use of the park as an educational resource. The Acadia Learning program complements these programs by working in the other direction, bringing the science at Acadia and other National Parks out to the schools. We do this by working with curriculum coordinators and teachers in different school districts across Maine, expanding over time to neighboring states. We provide curriculum materials, summer institutes, professional development during the school year, direct support from research scientists, and a professional learning community made up of teachers and scientists working together.

Making Sense of the World Through Observation and Data

Making sense of the world through reasoning based on direct observations and other data is at the core of the Acadia Learning Program. This places Acadia Learning squarely in the scientific tradition. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics notes that, “At the high school level, reasoning and sense‐making are of particular importance, but historically ‘reasoning’ has been limited to very select areas of the high school curriculum, and sense‐making is in many instances not present at all.” The Acadia Learning Program works to change this situation across education programs at all levels.

Context and Place

Sense‐making builds on context, which means that the Acadia Learning Program is inherently place‐based. “Place” can mean different things as students seek different kinds of understanding. In a study of cosmology, “place” might refer to the entire planet. In a study of pollution and toxic chemicals, “place” might refer to the entire Penobscot watershed. In a study of barriers to fish migration, “place” might focus on the study of a particular culvert.

Scale and Change

Learning to work across different scales of observation in this way is a key part of our program. We help students develop habits of thought that move across different scales as they work to make sense of the world around them, moving easily to a smaller scale as they seek to understand the mechanisms underlying change and to a larger scale as they seek to understand effects of change.

Ongoing Improvement and Educational Research

We are involved in continuous program evaluation and educational research so that we can share with other National Parks and more schools what we learn about helping teachers teach students to use data to make sense of their world.

Education Through Citizen Science

We have found that contribution to real scientific work, where the data that students and teachers collect contributes to a larger, serious research effort, provides important motivation for students to engage in the research effort. Whenever possible, we pursue our goal of enabling students to make sense of the world through observation and data in the context of citizen science programs.

Work with Partners

Acadia Partners brings educational research capability to its projects, but it is wholly dependent on partner organizations for scientific expertise and, in many cases, for the hands‐on capability to work with teachers. For most of its projects, it acts as a kind of “administrative home base,” integrating and managing the work of a variety of partners. Important partners include school districts, notably RSU 19 (Nokomis High School), RSU 3 (Mt. View High School), RSU 34 (Old Town High School), and RSU 24 (Ellsworth and Sumner High Schools). We also work in close partnership with a number of programs at the University of Maine, including the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research, Maine Sea Grant, and the Center for Science and Mathematics Education Research.

Current Program Activity

At this time the Acadia Learning Program involves teachers and students in two areas of research, one focused on mercury in biological systems and the other focused on improving our understanding of the ecology of the American Eel along the coast of the Gulf of Maine. In the next year we will seek funding to add a third study area, related to climate change. Consistent with Acadia Learning’s program goal, the common educational theme across these research areas is one of showing students how to perceive patterns in the world around them, formulate questions from those observations, collect data to help answer those questions, and to then use patterns and relationships in the data to make sense of their observations.

First Research Focus: Mercury Across the Landscape

Mercury in Maine and other northeastern states arrives primarily as air pollution, generated for the most part by burning coal in power plants. Mercury is attached to particulate matter and carried by winds, rain, fog, and snow, and so it would be reasonable to expect that mercury would be distributed evenly over wide areas. But that is not the case. The fish in adjacent ponds and insects on neighboring watersheds can have very different levels of mercury in their tissues. We do not yet understand the biological and geochemical mechanisms behind these differences. The question is important because mercury is a potent neurotoxin that accumulates at higher levels in a food chain. We have engaged teachers and students in schools from Scarborough to Old Town in a three year effort to collect macroinvertebrates (focusing in particular on dragonfly larvae) along with samples of other biota (leaf litter, other invertebrates, fish) that are analyzed for mercury content. The students develop hypotheses of their own, primarily related to bioaccumulation as mercury moves up the food chain, but also looking at differences between collection sites in terms of ecology, chemistry, and other factors. Students present their research in poster sessions. Because food webs are often surprisingly complex and because mercury levels vary from place to place, this research has provided a rich context for sense‐making. It also contributes to our broader understanding of how mercury varies across landscapes.

This work has been funded by the Maine Department of Education and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and has focused on professional development for teachers to improve their ability to engage students in inquiry, field research, and sense‐making. Second Research Focus: American Eels in Gulf of Maine Watersheds

We know surprisingly little about the role of the American Eel (Anguilla rostrata) in the ecology of Acadia National Park and other areas along the coast of Maine. This project, funded by NOAA for the next three years, will involve teachers and students in studying how watershed characteristics on regional scales (for example, human development, removal of downstream dams) and local scales (water chemistry, stream size, stream habitat, culverts and other obstructions) affect the population density and distribution of eels of different sizes and ages.

The project will: (1) provide teachers with the content knowledge, curriculum materials, protocols, and other materials required to support student engagement in the research and to integrate the research into the broader science curriculum; (2) provide students with an understanding of the dynamics of coastal watershed systems through a study of the role of eels in the watershed and of ecological relationships, physical and chemical requirements, and human dimensions that affect eels over their lifecycle; and (3) provide National Park Service, state agencies, and researchers with data that can support resource management and new research.

Third (New) Research Focus: Climate Change

These first two research areas involve substantial commitment to field research. For some teachers, the time commitment and logistics involved with fieldwork make it difficult to integrate our program into the structure of the science curriculum. We are exploring use of climate change as a focus area that will make more use of online data (ice core data, ice‐out dates for lakes, temperature data over time, and so on) in combination with more modest, “hands on” data collection, while still engaging students in the process of learning how to use data as a way to reach a larger understanding. Overarching Theme: Sense and Understanding from Data Each of these study areas is important in its own right, and each is related to resource concerns at National Parks and research concerns at our partner institutions. In addition to their value individually, each of these study areas provides support for the larger goal of the Acadia Learning program: enabling people to make sense of the world that they live in through the use of

observations and data.

This year we used support from NOAA and from the Maine Department of Education to initiate pilot work on an assessment instrument that teachers can use to gain understanding of barriers and deficiencies related to students’ ability to use graphs as a way to make sense of data. We have coupled that with a pilot professional development program to provide science teachers with new tools they can use to help students with graphing and sense‐making from data. We are in the process of partnering with the University of Maine and a variety of school districts to propose a new 3‐year program that will focus on refining these pilot efforts and on making them available to a much larger number of teachers.