Looking at the Evidence: How Certain Are We?

Science is not (all) about facts. There are questions to be answered, discoveries to be made. So, can we engage students with the unknowns in frontier science? How do we have them explore the sources of scientific uncertainty? And how does their understanding of complex scientific issues change when they have to justify their own claims?

What if the unknown is a question about climate change? 

Take the question: What will Earth’s average temperature be in 2100?  There is no right or wrong answer, yet scientists get excited about what they don’t know and tackle the question head on. They look at data and evidence, make observations, formulate ideas, and ask new questions. Students, however, have too often been taught that there are definite answers. Can science educators help students embrace uncertainty? Can students learn to interpret scientific data and understand scientific arguments?

To prepare students to weigh arguments and make informed decisions, we need instruction that promotes coherent understanding of data, as well as the factors that influence how certain we can be of the data. The Concord Consortium's High-Adventure Science project has created three investigations for middle and high school students that focus on current, compelling, unanswered scientific questions such as, "What will Earth’s climate be in the future?"

Each investigation incorporates interactive computer models, real-world data, and a video of a scientist currently working on the topic. In the five-day “Modeling Earth's Climate” investigation students use computational models to explore the feedback between variables such as atmospheric water vapor, atmospheric carbon dioxide, albedo, and ocean and air temperatures. The models allow students to quickly explore the behavior of Earth's complex climate system by experimenting with different initial conditions. By changing a model setting, they can easily determine the effect of that variable on the climate system. Students make claims based on evidence from the models, compare their results to real-world data, justify their claims, and describe what influenced their confidence in their claims.

We will present how students' scientific argumentation skills are changed through the process of teaching students how to think explicitly about certainty with respect to data and the use of interactive models. Especially in frontier science, such as climate change research, where claims can be disputed and changes arise as new evidence is produced, this level of critical thinking is a key skill for students to develop.