Explicitly Linking Human Impact to Ecological Function in Secondary School Classrooms

Both the old National Science Education Standards (NSES) and the recent "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) devote significant resources to learning about human environmental impact. Whereas the NSES advocate learning about human environmental impact in a section apart from the scie...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe American biology teacher Vol. 76; no. 8; pp. 508 - 515
Main Authors Wyner, Yael, Becker, Johnathan, Torff, Bruce
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published University of California Press 01.10.2014
Subjects
Academic Standards
Biology
Comparative Analysis
Conservation (Environment)
Control Groups
Ecology
Environmental Education
Experimental Groups
Grade 9
Influences
Integrated Curriculum
New York
Pretests Posttests
Science Instruction
Science Tests
Secondary School Science
Teaching Methods
New York
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Summary:Both the old National Science Education Standards (NSES) and the recent "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) devote significant resources to learning about human environmental impact. Whereas the NSES advocate learning about human environmental impact in a section apart from the science- content learning strands, the NGSS embed them in the core life- science and ecology learning strands. We describe a study that compared the effects of these different approaches on ninth-grade biology student learning. It found that students learned significantly more human-environmental-impact and ecological-function content when human-impact content was embedded in ecology content than when human impact was taught as a discrete unit from ecology.
ISSN:0002-7685
DOI:10.1525/abt.2014.76.8.4