As a kid in elementary school, Matthew Schneps used to pore over transcripts of astronauts conversing in their rocket's cockpit, an activity that thrilled him, even though he didn't necessarily understand what they were saying.
"I was scarfing up all this information," Schneps says of the transcripts, which were sent to him by a cousin who worked for NASA. "It didn't have a lot of meaning to me, but the fact that I could go to the source materials that were the real thing had a lot of impact."
Years later, an environmental science Web site that Schneps and his colleagues have developed engages its audience, which includes high school teachers, in the same way. To the extent possible, the content comes directly from actual scientific researchers, and because it is based on real-world environmental research, it is more relevant, vital, and even dramatic than standard textbooks.
Because of its effectiveness in conveying environmental science as an exciting, dynamic subject, "The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science" has been selected to receive the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE). Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
"What sets 'The Habitable Planet' apart," says Science editorial fellow Melissa McCartney, "is that it integrates course curriculum with video case studies of current environmental research being done by leading scientists, putting a face and a real-world context to the science that the students are learning."
The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) was designed to promote exceptional online materials that are available free of charge to science educators. The acronym SPORE refers to a reproductive element adapted to develop, often in less than ideal conditions, into something new. The winning projects are intended to be the seed of progress in education, even in the face of formidable challenges to educational innovation. Science publishes an article about each winning project by the project's developer. The article about Schneps' Web site will be published in the May 28 issue of Science.
"We're trying to advance science education," says Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science. "This competition will provide much-needed recognition for innovators in the field whose efforts promise significant benefits for students and for science literacy in general. The publication in Science of an article on each Web site will help guide educators around the globe to valuable free resources that might otherwise be missed."
The researchers in the Web site's many videos bring "a little extra zing" to the featured topics, Schneps says, because the scientists' own curiosity and passion are what brought them to their research. That zeal, which in its most general sense is a love of figuring things out, is palpable. Yet in addition to offering the excitement of firsthand accounts and materials related to scientific research, which were selected by top experts in the field of environmental science, Habitable Planet also facilitates a different kind of learning.
Whereas much science classroom learning is linear, assuming students build knowledge sequentially, Habitable Planet offers a broader, more holistic presentation—especially through its videos, where viewers take in all kinds of details about how science is done that are independent of the more linear voice-over. "We're able to bring in some of the broad messiness of the lab without losing the structure of what is being taught," Schneps says.
In this way, learners who develop their understanding almost as though they are filling in areas of a big picture are more inclined to achieve that understanding—and all learners are more inclined to get a better idea of what science really is.
Schneps, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, grew up in Tokyo and New York City. He was interested in science from an early age, and two science teachers he encountered—who told their classes they didn't know anything about what they were supposed to teach but were willing to learn alongside their students—affected him strongly. "They were both really curious," Schneps says, "about why things happen. They had this attitude: If I don't understand something, I can figure it out." As Schneps was reaching the end of graduate school, he decided to become a science educator, realizing he was more interested in "how we know about things than in the things themselves."
In the 1980s, he worked on a video called "A Private Universe," which showed Harvard graduates unable to correctly explain such common phenomena as the seasons and the phases of the moon. Most of the students, for example, said the seasons change because the Earth's orbit brings it closer to the sun in summer and sends it further away in winter. The video's message, Scheps says, was not that the graduates were unintelligent, but rather that there must be some reason they had adopted incorrect theories.
Although Schneps is a physicist, the topic of Habitable Planet is environmental science for two reasons. It is of course a topic of serious concern, and its is often left out of the regular high school curriculum in favor of biology, physics, and chemistry. "There's a crying need for environmental science materials," Schneps says. "People are looking for them, and when they find Habitable Planet, they see that it's very well thought-through and attractive. When they find it, they like it."
The Web site's page views for the month of February alone were counted at 200,000. Among other courses on the learner.org Web site where it is hosted, it recorded more than 100,000 more page views in a month than the next most popular course site. It is recommended on teacher resource sites, and teachers write in to the Web site about its effectiveness.
In the works, says Schneps, are similar courses in "Physics for the 21st Century" and "Learning and the Brain," as well as a take on chemistry.
In the meantime, Schneps says he thinks the recognition of being a SPORE winner could draw other scientists or funding from science sources to the project. "I think it's a very important award," he says, "that is being given by scientists who are interested in the science. It sends a very clear message to the community of scientists that here is some responsible work that merits attention."
To visit "The Habitable Planet," go to learner.org/courses/envsci/.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine (www.sciencetranslationalmedicine.org) and Science Signaling (www.sciencesignaling.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy; international programs; science education; and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.