Ocean or marine science courses have existed for decades in U.S. high schools. Although these courses can effectively integrate the sciences in ways that stimulate student curiosity and interest, they have not yet received formal recognition for the role they could play in improving science education for secondary students or teachers.

This poster describes the rationale for developing a course on methods for teaching ocean science, the conceptual framework for the course, curricula and instructional strategies, and the methods for assessing the effectiveness of the course and impact on classroom practice. The course will incorporate ocean science content and online investigations using ocean and atmospheric data. The course will be taught for graduate credit at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), and course participants will most likely include students enrolled in a masters program in curriculum and instruction or environmental education and practicing teachers in the Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade school districts. An inquiry-based instructional approach will provide a structure for designing the course. This approach is based on the 5-E model of instruction (i.e. engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation), and will be used to connect the text and online laboratories.

Or particular focus, are the notions of learning progressions and systems thinking, which will guide the development of the course. A learning progression consists of a set of standards that can be structured into a developmental trajectory (Wilson & Bertenthal, 2005). Learning progressions are descriptions of successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about an idea that follow one another as students learn and lay out what it means to move toward more expert understanding. Learning progressions are necessary to understand big ideas. The research on learning progressions will guide the sequencing of instruction of the concepts presented in each of the chapters of Online Ocean Studies. Students will learn the central conceptual structures or big ideas in ocean science. One example is the Ocean Literacy Principle which states that “the ocean is a major influence on weather and climate.” The students will learn to trace a progression of concepts and describe a succession of knowledge that would lead to development of deeper insights about this big idea related to the ocean-atmospheric system.