Science Education

"Quality education in math and science is everyone's challenge and responsibility. The nation's economic welfare and security are at stake."
-- The National Science Board of the National Science Foundation

Science Education - An Integrated Approach
Creating a program to deliver effective inquiry based science requires a coordinated strategy combining professional development for teachers, team teaching techniques, classroom instruction and investigative field experiences. Integrating these components into a teacher's predetermined curriculum and supporting state and national academic standards is the focus and goal of the program. Teachers are pressured to accomplish many objectives during a school day. It is important that The Science Center activities enhance and support these objectives. Further program development will require expanding professional development opportunities for teachers, adding qualified staff instructors, acquiring additional laboratory and field study equipment and a vehicle for transporting equipment and material to the schools and field site locations. Through classroom visits, professional scientists will provide mentorship and inspiration to the students. Professional on-site research projects will be interpreted for education programs both on-site and through Internet monitoring.



Integrated Technologies
As we look to the future in education, technology will inevitably play an increasingly significant role. The challenge before us is to keep up with technological advancements and to effectively utilize and integrate these technologies into our education strategies. However, we must be cautious not to incorporate technology simply for the sake of technology. It must be used as a tool to achieve a predetermined goal. In the science education programs, repeated, physical field site investigations may not be financially practical. The cost of transportation to schools is often prohibitive and where we would like to get the students out of the classroom for several field experiences, we are likely to find this is not always possible. Through technology, it is possible to extend one field experience into an ongoing program in the classroom. Digital cameras may be used to monitor environmental activity such as seasonal changes. These same cameras can be manipulated remotely from the classroom to change views, to record time lapse imaging or to create a data base for study and evaluation. Environmental monitoring equipment can record atmospheric conditions, rates of surface water flow and turbidity, soil conditions, and a variety of other environmental conditions. Through the Internet, it is now possible for teachers and students to design and conduct experiments at field locations from their classroom. Equally important is our ability to disseminate the information gathered to other schools and classrooms through the World Wide Web.

This scenario is very basic within today's technological capabilities. A technology committee is being formed to investigate the ways and means of integrating technology effectively into science education. In the end, technology must support the classroom curriculum. It must provide online monitoring of student initiated experiments and research projects and it must provide a network to share data between schools, classrooms and students.

Teachers interested in developing a program in their school should contact Sil Pembleton, Education Director at 507-664-0770 or
sil@maltbynaturepreserve.org