2.3 Helping Middle School Students Build Understanding of Hazardous Weather and Its Impacts with the GLOBE Weather Curriculum

Monday, 13 January 2020: 2:30 PM
258C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Becca Hatheway, UCAR, Boulder, CO; and J. Ristvey Jr., L. S. Gardiner, M. Rummel, E. Snode-Brenneman, J. S. Malmberg, R. Curry, L. H. Chambers, and T. Murphy

GLOBE Weather, a five-week middle school unit that we debuted earlier in 2019, helps students learn about weather phenomena with a focus on how weather affects our lives.

At the start of the unit, students learn about a massive rainstorm that caused widespread flooding. This anchoring phenomenon is designed to spark students’ curiosity about how and why hazardous storm happens and how communities are affected by severe weather events. Throughout the unit, students return to the anchoring phenomenon prepared to answer their own questions about the science of the storm.

Then, students spend about four weeks investigating weather phenomena - from small scale atmospheric processes, such as the formation of humidity and clouds, to larger-scale atmospheric processes that cause storms, such as the collision of air masses at fronts. They learn through activities, demonstrations, weather data collection, and data analysis and develop models to describe what they learn.

At the end of the unit, students use what they have learned about weather to make sense of a winter storm as it travels across the United States. By interpreting weather data, they make predictions of where snow is most likely, interpret maps of weather warnings, and predict where school may be cancelled because of snow and ice from the storm.

The GLOBE Weather curriculum is aligned with Next Generation Science Standards’ performance expectations (MS-ESS2-4, MS-ESS2-5, and MS-ESS2-6) and uses resources from the GLOBE Program (globe.gov), such as weather data and protocols for data collection, to promote student understanding of weather phenomena and its impacts. The curriculum, developed by the UCAR Center for Science Education and BSCS with funding from NASA and support from GLOBE Implementation Office, is freely available at globeweathercurriculum.com.
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