PROJECT SUMMARY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

• Background
• Future Direction
• Objectives and Rationale
• Methods
  • Teacher Training
  • Minority Student Participation
  • Natural History Curriculum Development
  • Photography and Image Processing
  • Web Site Development for All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory
  • Help Introduce Minority Students to Careers in the National Park Service
  • Technical Support
  • Dissemination and Evaluation
  • Time Table
• Personnel and Organizational Structure
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personnel
• Existing Facilities and Equipment

BUDGET

PROPOSED SOURCES OF FUNDS

BUDGET JUSTIFICATION

CURRICULUM VITAE -- John Pickering

APPENDIX 1 Athens-Clarke County Teacher and Student Training Participants

APPENDIX 2 Smoky Mountain Adventure -- Example

LETTERS OF SUPPORT

Keith Langdon, Coordinator of Inventories and Monitoring, GSMNP, and John Pickering, Institute of Ecology, UGA, are coordinating the GSMNP-ATBI. In December, 1997, they organized Discover Life's first planning workshop. The workshop was attended by over 120 individuals from over 50 universities and organizations. In February, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy hosted a briefing at which Discover Life was presented to scientists and government officials. At this briefing, Mike Soukup, Associate Director for Natural Resources Stewardship and Science of the National Park Service, stated that the GSMNP-ATBI is by far the largest and most important science project being undertaken in any national park. For more details see "Smoky Mountains All-Taxa Survey Proposed," J. Kaiser, 1997, Science 278:1871, and the organization's interim Web site .

On April 3, 1998, the Friends of GSMNP hosted a workshop to initiate the formal legal structure for Discover Life to develop and coordinate local, national, and international partnerships with GSMNP. These partnerships will involve students, scientists, educators, and other individuals interested in the study and conservation of biodiversity. Given the proximity of Athens-Clarke County (ACC) and GSMNP, and the overlap in species between Georgia's piedmont and the Great Smokies, we hope that Discover Life will form strong bonds between ACC and the Park.

As part of Discover Life, we propose to create a new educational program. This program will pilot methods to enhance science education by developing community partnerships with the National Park Service. We have held three community meetings in ACC to build this program. See for details and lists of meeting participants. These meetings resulted in the proposed 1-year plan that includes activities focused on training teachers and minority students how to study biodiversity and build Web pages.

The current proposal stems from the discussions at the community meetings. Participants in the community meetings included the National Park Service, ACC School District, State Botanical Gardens, parks, and libraries. Within the University, participants included the Museum of Natural History, Office of Special Academic Programs, and faculty, staff, and students from the College of Arts and Science, College of Education, and School of Government. The proposal has been developed in conjunction with Norma McNair, Executive Director, Instructional Services, Athens-Clarke County School District, who oversees the District's curricula, and with Robert Bluett, Julie Bower, Ken Sherman, and Charles Worthy, who are principals at participating schools. Funding for this project is requested from the Southeast Regional Office of the NPS and from various sources within UGA.

The school population in ACC School District is 56% African American and 9% other minorities. An important goal of the proposed project is for researchers and park employees to train, mentor, and encourage minority students to become scientists and consider careers in the National Park Service. Students today face an increasingly complex work environment filled with technological challenges. By linking students with researchers, we will provide a valuable inquiry-based, problem solving, educational experience that will prepare students for those challenges that lie ahead. If we are successful, we hope that some of the students whom we train will gain the interest, skills, and opportunity to work with the National Park Service in future years.

• Teacher Training: By working with researchers at UGA and GSMNP, teachers will get hands-on training with state-of-the-art technology and research protocols so that they can put more natural history into their curricula and oversee student participation in scientific studies.

• Minority Student Participation: We plan to teach minority elementary, middle and high
  

  school students about science and technology through hands-on experience studying biodiversity and natural history to help prepare them for the information age.

• Natural History Curriculum Development: We plan to develop science education
  

  curricula that involve students in authentic research, meet rigorous science education standards, and develop essential investigation skills.
  
  

• Develop Technical and Audio Visual Skills: We plan to train teachers and minority
  

  students to use computers, digital cameras, photographic scanners and related software to present information on the WWW. They will ultimately photograph and electronically scan images of over 120 focal species of amphibians, birds, insects, and plants common to both GSMNP and ACC.

• Web Site Development for All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory: Students will create home
  

  pages documenting over 120 species that occur in GSMNP and ACC and present them on the WWW as part of the GSMNP-ATBI.

• Help Introduce Minority Students to Careers in the National Park Service: Our long term
  

  goal is to increase the pool of minority students interested in pursuing a career with the National Parks Service, especially in fields related to environmental science.
  

We propose to provide teachers with 6 Staff Development Units (SDU) of credit for completing the following 60 hours of training: (1) a 30-hour intensive summer course; (2) a 3-day field trip to GSMNP (20 hours); (3) five 2-hour follow-up sessions during the summer to be scheduled at the convenience of teachers and instructors; (4) classroom assistance during the academic year; and (5) minority teacher laboratory experience. Participants unable to attend the 30 hour intensive summer course may attend other available Web publishing workshops scheduled this summer.

• Summer Training Course, June 18-July 1, 1998
  

  This summer, we will introduce 9 teachers and 12 students (Appendix 1) to the study of natural history and computer technology with an 10-day intensive training course, June 18-July 1, 1998. Teachers will bring minority students to the program to begin a year-long teacher/student partnership. The goal is to train teachers in the study of natural history and enhance computer skills to use in the classroom.

  We plan to develop natural history curricula for different academic levels. We will target elementary, middle, and high school students in a manner appropriate for the skill level of each group. For instance, our natural history curricula will primarily focus on class projects and activities for elementary school students, on group projects for middle school students, and on individual projects for high school students. Participants will include 2 elementary, 6 middle, and 4 high school students, and 1 elementary, 5 middle, and 3 high school teachers (Appendix 1). The goals for all students and teachers will include:
  

  1) Understand how scientists ask and answer questions;
  

  2) Learn data collection and recording skills;
  

  3) Become familiar with the role of museums in preserving our natural history by visiting UGA's Herbarium, Museum of Natural History, and the State Botanical Gardens;
  

  4) Learn about southeastern plant communities, community structure, disturbance and succession by visiting local parks such as the Sandy Creek Nature Center;
  

  5) Learn the natural history and ecology of local flora and fauna that have home ranges in common with GSMNP;
  

  6) Learn basic computer skills through hands-on experience using a computer;
  

  7) Learn how to use cameras and photographic scanners;
  

  8) Gain experience retrieving information from the library and WWW;
  

  9) Create Web pages to present text and images on species in common with ACC and GSMNP.
  

• Web Training Workshops
  

  John O'Looney, School of Government, UGA, will conduct two 2-day training workshops, June 25-26 and June 29-30, to train middle and high school teachers about basic Web publishing. This program will be available to teachers and will range from basic computer introduction to simple Web page building. Teachers unable to take the 10-day summer course may attend these sessions.

  John O'Looney will conduct four additional 3-day Internet camps funded by BellSouth that pair teachers and students. The workshops will be held: June 17-19 and July 13-15, for 6-8 grade students and their teachers, and June 22-24 and July 20-22 for 9-12 grade students and their teachers.

• Follow-up Visits
  

  After completing the intensive summer workshop, teachers will be asked to schedule five additional 2-hour sessions for personalized instruction and curriculum development. They will have the opportunity to work with instructors on an individual basis to create lesson plans and activities to use during the year. The project's instructors will help teachers to integrate research methods and technology into their science curricula.

• Classroom Assistance in ACC Schools
  

  Elizabeth Skillen, Amy Edwards, Liz McGhee, and other project participants will assist teachers in implementing proposed science and technology curricula through scheduled in-class visits throughout the academic year. At least one of them will visit the classrooms of the 11 the teachers who participated in the summer training course 10 times during the year. They will help teachers to implement natural history curricula developed during the summer and assist with technological and scientific questions in the classroom. They will also assist teachers and students with building species homepages for the GSMNP-ATBI.

• Minority Teacher Laboratory Experience
  

  Dr. Gordhan Patel, Dean of UGA's Graduate School, has funding from the National Institute of Health for minority teachers and students to gain laboratory experience. This program invites minority teachers to work in research laboratories at UGA for 8 weeks. In cooperation with Jarvis McArthur, who coordinates this program, Dr. Pickering plans to supervise an ACC minority teacher and one other teacher to do research in his laboratory, the Museum of Natural History, the Herbarium, and GSMNP. Elizabeth Skillen, a graduate student in Dr. Pickering's laboratory, will introduce these teachers to field work in GSMNP, insect sorting, identification, databasing, and analysis. These teachers will learn about the collections and research conducted in the Museum of Natural History, Herbarium, and Twin Creeks facility at GSMNP. At the end of their project, these teachers will write a research report, present a poster, and make an oral presentation on their work at the Tate Student Center at UGA.

Minority Student Participation

The project will serve elementary, middle, and high schools in the northeast Georgia region. Teachers will bring minority students to the proposed summer training course to begin developing a teacher-student partnership that will continue through the school year. For participants in this course, we propose to provide a laptop computer for use at each school.

Natural History Curriculum Development

TREC and The Concord Consortium (1997) in a report on the "National Conference on Student and Scientist Partnerships" outlined three important components of any such alliance: (1) they depend on serious collaboration between scientists and students;( 2) they engage students in research of real value to scientists; and (3) they benefit both science and education. It is in this spirit that we will promote student and scientist partnerships to study and discover natural history and biodiversity, meet rigorous science education standards, and develop essential investigation skills. Topics students might investigate include: plant herbivory; insect and plant seasonality; predator-prey, host-parasite, plant-animal associations; geographic distributions and environmental requirements of selected taxa; the relative abundance of species in different habitats, and the effects of weather on biological activity, population dynamics, and individual growth rates and vitality.

One focus of the program will be to get faculty members at UGA to act as mentors to students in ACC. Faculty members such as Patty Gowaty and John Pickering, Institute of Ecology, Tom Hagen, Department of Microbiology, Bob Matthews, Department of Entomology, will bring the scientific questions to the program and curricula. These ideas will be taught to teachers and students by Amy Edwards and Liz McGhee (Museum of Natural History), Kitty Esco and Mary Lue Walser (Office of Special Academic Programs), and Elizabeth Skillen, through the summer training course, workshops, and continued in outreach during the academic year.

We will develop natural history curricula for elementary, middle and high school students. These curricula will be designed to meet objectives in Georgia's Quality Core Curriculum (QCC) with the assistance of Norma McNair, ACC School District. For example, under the QCC requirements for Biology under the topic "Diversity of Life (Kingdom Animalia: Invertebrates), " high school students will learn to identify certain insects, understand their classification system, and life processes. We will focus our curriculum development on involving students in authentic research while helping teachers fulfill QCC requirements. Curricula will also align with the new National Science Education Standards.

Photography and Image Processing

We will train students and teachers in the summer course to create digital images of amphibians, vascular plants, insects, and birds. We will train students and teachers to use cameras and computer equipment, including flatbed and slide scanners and graphic software to optimize digital images for presentation on the World Wide Web (WWW).

After completing the summer training course, teachers will train students in their classrooms to use cameras, scanners, and computer software in the classroom with the help of in-class instructors from our program. The goal will be to have ACC students contribute to the inventory in the GSMNP-ATBI through yearlong activities related to natural history studies and species homepage development. They will ultimately produce 1-5 images per species homepage for the GSMNP-ATBI.

Web Site Development for All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory

With guidance from Keith Langdon, GSMNP, students will create homepages of focal species within the park that will include images, tables, and hypertext links between them and other sites. Students will be active participants in developing Web sites for the GSMNP-ATBI. Some examples of the types of information the species Web pages might include are: species scientific name, species author, a list of common names, a listing of related taxa, an identification and description of a species including diagnostic characters to distinguish it from other species, and an overview of the species distribution and relative abundance. For an example of a Web page created by Catherine Branch, a UGA student, please see . For details of this assignment see .

GSMNP contains over 130 species of trees, 65 species of mammals, 27 species of salamanders, and more than 230 species of birds that use the Park (see ). Keith Langdon, John Pickering and Elizabeth Skillen will make a list of those species in common with both ACC and GSMNP before assigning Web pages to students. We propose that participating elementary school teachers' classes create a species homepage of a vertebrate, an invertebrate, and a vascular plant, for at total of 18 homepages. These students will create the homepages as class projects within their natural history curriculum. Similarly, the middle school teachers' classes will create at least 50 homepages by having students work in groups. The high school students will work independently or in small groups to create at least 60 home pages. Thus, in total, we anticipate that approximately 500 students will learn the technology and create over 120 species homepages for the GSMNP-ATBI.

Help Introduce Minority Students to Careers in the National Park Service

The mission of the national park service to maintain a diverse work force is best stated by NPS Director Robert Stanton (1998):

"My vision of the National Park Service is to preserve and maintain the nation's treasures entrusted in our care, to the highest levels of quality possible, and to accomplish this through a highly skilled, dedicated work force that exemplifies the rich diversity of our national parks and our nation. In our efforts to carry out this mission and vision, we are committed to recruiting, hiring, developing, promoting and retaining a qualified diverse work force. Diversity in the work place values employees in all occupations and at all levels, and provides them with the opportunities for working at their full potential. Diversity encompasses more than differences in race, national origin, disabilities, age, gender, religion or sexual orientation; it includes the different values, cultures and perspectives possessed by individuals from different groups."

Technical Support

In the summer and fall, Bryan McLucas will provide technical computer assistance to teachers and students in the project. He will be available 20 hours each week at UGA's Bioscience Learning Center (BLC) or in school classrooms as needed. Bryan will maintain the Web site and help teachers and students with computer questions or problems. He will also assist teachers and students with the completion of the species homepages for the GSMNP-ATBI.

Dissemination and Evaluation

Project evaluation will be conducted by Dr. Catherine Teare Ketter. It will assess four student-centered objectives:

• Improve scientific skills and understanding. A pool of core concepts and investigative skills will be identified. Teacher performance will be assessed in a pre-test and post test design.
  
• Improve problem solving. Teacher performance on a series of problems involving embedded science knowledge, skills, and reasoning within everyday problems will be compared with prior programs. Student performance will be assessed by analyzing Iowa Basic Skills Test (IBST) subscale scores related to problem-solving sills for elementary and middle school students (grades 3 & 8). High school student problem solving abilities will be determined as a function of the Georgia High School Graduation Test (GASGT) subscale scores for numerical analysis and problem solving. A problem-solving task test will be developed for each student age group. Task test scores will be related to the standardized scores obtained on either the ITBS or GASGT.
  
• Improve the ability to identify everyday and career­specific application of science for students/teachers from low-socio-economic/minority backgrounds. A series of scenarios will be devised wherein foundation scientific concepts play a significant role. Students/teachers will identify and describe the role of key concepts and skills as they influence society's view on the importance of our environment and it's natural history.
  
• Increase interest in science by non-science majors. Students/teachers will rate their perceptions of importance of science and communication skills in their daily lives and relevance prior to, and after completion of this project.

Time Table