A glimpse of the near future:

This year, along the West Coast of the United States, the news has been dominated by stories of powerful winds, deadly flash floods, and record rainfall events. A high school science teacher in Boyes Hot Springs, California has her students measure rainfall once a week during science class. Each year they graph these numbers, but several times this year the rain gauge has filled before they checked it. A skeptical student asked, "Is it raining more than usual?" Last year, Ms. Feichert would have been unable to help the students answer their question because their weekly data set has missing data points and quality control concerns. This year, Ms. Feichert was ready! Earlier in the year, she participated in a training at the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve where she learned to use NOAA's National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS) curriculum and data, and discovered where to find the data that would answer her students’ question without overwhelming them. She also built her own confidence in using data and encouraging student-driven inquiry in the classroom.

By working through a couple of Estuaries 101 lessons on human and ocean influences on rainfall patterns that she downloaded and printed, Ms. Feichert's students honed the data analysis skills necessary to tackle their question. Ms. Feichert's school is in a low-income community and doesn’t have a fast internet connection, so teachers there haven’t used on-line curriculum before. Ms. Feichert, though, knows that the Estuaries 101 website was designed with her students, and their computers, in mind. She teams up with their technology specialist and directs them to the Estuaries 101 website. From there, the students can compare average rainfall values over the course of one year (or a day, a week, or a month) to those from previous years. They can make the same comparisons at five NERRS sites on the West Coast. After downloading, graphing, and interpreting the data, the students concluded that it rained much more in January than in an average January, but that the yearly average rainfall was not abnormal. After answering their original question, several of the students explored how the rainfall patterns affected salinity in the estuary in an attempt to decide whether this was a good year to take the fishing trip they have been planning.

Like the teacher in this hypothetical example, educators who use the new Estuaries 101: From the Coast to the Classroom curriculum and associated data will have the capability to guide their students in performing complex marine science investigations to solve exciting, authentic questions. In addition to learning how to use the weather data, training in the Estuaries 101 will give these teachers access to data from 104 water quality monitoring stations located in estuaries across the nation that each generate 96 data points every day of the year—enough data to answer many rounds of questions! Students' questions may arise from school-based water quality or weather monitoring programs where they collect the same type of data as the NERRS System-wide Monitoring Program (SWMP), or from past experiences with estuaries, perhaps testing water quality on a school field trip. Data exploration encourages deeper understanding and insight into natural processes that will allow students to move from learning general concepts like, 'oceans are important to human civilization’ to a personal understanding that ‘the amount of rainfall we get, and therefore whether my house floods or not, depends on the circulation patterns in the ocean'.

NOAA's National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS), in collaboration with teachers across the nation, the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office and a professional contractor TERC (Boston, Mass.), is currently working to create easier access to NERRS' extensive water quality and weather data and that from NOAA's Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System (CBIBS) and developing scaffolded curriculum designed to build students' analytical skills.

Click here to learn more about this effort to create the Estuaries 101 Curriculum and find out how you can participate.