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Introduction: Why Does This Place Look the Way it Does?

Why are there trillions of shells in the Colorado River delta?

Page 1: Introduction to using Virtual Field work Experiences (You are here)

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Essential Questions

Using Virtual Fieldwork Experiences in the classroom
Goals and Objectives
General Objectives for VFEs
VFEs across the curriculum and connected to the NGSS
Using VFEs to foster rich discussion

Preview the VFE and consider what you will focus upon

Page 2: Why Are There Trillions of Seashells in the Colorado River Delta?

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The Colorado River Delta Virtual Fieldwork Experience: Why Are There Trillions of Seashells in the Colorado River Delta?

• Objectives specific to the Colorado River VFE
• Background
• The Colorado River Delta VFE

Page 3: Tools of real and virtual fieldwork for scientific inquiry

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Tools of real and virtual fieldwork for scientific inquiry

• Questions to guide field inquiry
• Productive field inquiry raises new questions
• A photograph is a dataset
• How to look at a specimen
• Consider the most important takeaways

Using Virtual Fieldwork as a catalyst for actual fieldwork


The Tower Shoals shell accumulations in the Colorado River delta. Note that this image is an interactive Gigapan panorama. Use your mouse and the controls in the upper right corner of the image to view fullscreen, and to pan and zoom. View this Gigapan on its own page here to see additional features.

Essential Question:

Essential questions for our Virtual Fieldwork Experiences (VFEs) always include some version of "Why does this place look the way it does?" We hope that users of these VFEs will also ask this question about their local environment and that they compare their local environment to environments explored in VFEs. Essential questions should drive your investigation. A good essential question is essentially bottomless - that is, it can never be fully answered though inquiry driven by the question can continually produce deeper understandings.


Using Virtual Fieldwork Experiences in the classroom

This page is written in a way that is intended to serve an array of users. The most obvious audiences are teachers and students, but we hope that it serves anyone who wants to unearth the story of a place. Readers may engage in that exploration alone or together. In many field trip settings, whether virtual field trips like this one, or at an actual field site, teachers or field trip leaders point things out. That can be interesting, educational, and fun, but the learning is likely to be more durable if the learner figures things out. Ideally, in working together, teachers will act as collaborators with students, and will work to figure things out together.

The content of these pages should be helpful for learners from middle school to adult. It is most directly suited to high school Earth and environmental science classes. Completing all the content in a high school class would take several typical class days, but teachers may wish to select a specific part or specific parts of the VFE rather than using all of the content. If the VFE is used as a model for creating a VFE of your own field site, this could take more than several days, and be usefully spread across a semester or year of instruction. (See also VFEs across the curriculum).

Goals and Objectives:

We hope that sharing strategies for teaching and learning with the learners, as we are doing here, will help learners to be more metacognitive. Metacognitive learners are learners who actively learn how they learn, and work to manage and improve their learning processes.

These hopes represent one set of goals for learning and instruction. More traditional objectives are included in the next section and goals and objectives directly related to The Next Generation Science Standards are found here.

General Objectives for VFEs

There are a large range of possible learning objectives that can be satisfied exploring the content of a site. The most basic (and specific) knowledge level objectives relate to dominant processes or features at the site. Examples include: Describe three ways streams shape this landscape, or, describe how shale forms.

Utimately, we hope learners satisfy more sophisticated objectives that are higher on Bloom's Taxonomy. While we will share some objectives that might be addressed or satisfied in working with content of this site, we also recognize (and welcome the idea) that educators and learners will choose or develop their own objectives for their use of the site. In choosing to do that, they will be more metacognitive than those who simply follow whatever suggestions we happen to make.

High level objectives that we hope users aspire to include:

A fundamental goal of learning in the geosciences is to be able to answer the question, “Why does this place look the way it does?” where “this place” is wherever you happened to be, or whatever location you happen to be studying. The question leads to a sort of “who done it?” – a mystery, or set of interlocking mysteries, to be solved. Unearthing these mysteries is rarely a simple task. A landscape is always the result of the interplay of many different processes, often over very long periods of time. There is never, or almost never, one single process that explains why a particular landscape is the way that it is.

Implicit within the third objective is the idea that using a Virtual Fieldwork Experience ideally leads to actual fieldwork experiences. As you work through a VFE, consider how the VFE site compares to your field site or your local environment and consider how the questions within the VFE are relevant to your site.

More about objectives

These objectives do lack specificity in terms of the level of detail for explanations and the scale of the VFE to be created. Educators might determine this before working with their students, or educators and students might work together to negotiate the scale of the explanations and models. Applying analogical reasoning to the interpretation of environments is an important skill used in field science and maybe a component of an objective.

The "interested others" mentioned in the third objective could be community members, or other classes. Inexpensive video conferencing allows the interested others to be a great distance away. We suggest connecting classrooms the country, and can help facilitate that.

Individual VFEs will include additional objectives that are specific to the environmental setting or content addressed within the VFE, and users (educators and students) may identify further objectives.

The sections on The Next Generation Science Standards below also address objectives.

VFEs across the curriculum and connected to the NGSS

Expand for a discussion of how VFEs can be used across the curriculum
VFEs across the curriculum

Nearly every unit in an Earth or environmental science course, and most of the units in a biology course, play out in some meaningful way in most environments, including the one outside your classroom door. The table below lists units in typical Earth science and biology curricula. Look through the list and consider how each unit influences the landscape where you live and the landscape or landscapes you will explore through virtual fieldwork.

Units in a typical Earth science course: Units in a typical biology course:
• Introduction: Size, Shape, and Composition of Earth • Introduction: Unity and Diversity among living things
• Mapping • Maintenance in living things
• Rocks and Minerals • Human Physiology
• Weathering, Erosion, Deposition, and Landforms • Reproduction and Development
• Earthquakes and Plate Tectonics • Transmission of traits from generation to generation
• Earth History & Paleontology • Evolution (Note: Evolution is both a crosscutting theme and a unit.)
• Meteorology and Climate • Ecology
• Astronomy

It’s all there – each and every one of these curriculum units is happening outside your classroom door, outside the door of your home, and wherever your field site happens to be. Fieldwork, whether real or virtual, can be used to deepen understandings for any and all of these topics.1

While it is all there, there is also ambiguity. Doing fieldwork, whether virtual or actual, has substantial important differences from doing traditional schoolwork. We think that's a good thing. Reading the lay of the land, answering the question of why a place looks the way it does is complex work that both develops and requires the understandings of content from multiple disciplines and - at least as importantly - understanding the meaning of the connections amongst those disciplinary ideas. In other words, doing fieldwork is more like doing life than it is like doing schoolwork.

Complexify the seemingly simple

Much of what we do in school simplifies the seemingly complex. That is important to do much of the time, but it is also important to complexify the seemingly simple - to dig into the complex nature of how our world works and to recognize the Earth system as an example of a complex system. Fieldwork, whether real or virtual, provides excellent opportunities for studying the interplay of different Earth systems and processes. As you explore your field site, consider the connections amongst the processes of life, rock formation, and the nature of weather and climate. Then consider connections to other areas of science, and to disciplines beyond science.

How does Virtual Fieldwork connect to The Next Generation Science Standards?

Virtual Fieldwork and the Next Generation Science Standards

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is a multi-state effort to create new education standards that are "rich in content and practice, arranged in a coherent manner across disciplines and grades to provide all students an internationally benchmarked science education." The NGSS presents science as "three-dimensional," where the three dimensions are "Scientific and Engineering Practices," "Crosscutting Concepts," and, "Disciplinary Core Ideas." These are shown in the table below.

This webpage assumes basic familiarity with NGSS. "The Teacher-Friendly Guides, Virtual Fieldwork, and the NGSS's Three-Dimensional Science," the appendix of The Teacher-Friendly Guide to the Earth Science of the United States, gives a general overview of how fieldwork, whether real or virtual, can be used in NGSS-informed instruction. It also can serve as an introduction to the NGSS.

For teacher-written descriptions of the kinds of conceptual shifts that the NGSS requires, see the Shifts page of the Practices Resources in Science and Math (PRISM) website. The site also includes video cases of NGSS-based teaching.

Summary of NGSS’s Three Dimensions. For more detailed descriptions, see the relevant appendices in The Next Generation Science Standards at http://nextgenscience.org/.


Virtual and actual fieldwork are very well suited to teaching three-dimensional science in ways that resonates with NGSS. Here's an extended excerpt from the appendix mentioned above.

Deep understandings of why your local environment looks the way it does requires understanding the local environment from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and understanding the connections amongst these different disciplinary ideas. That is, to understand your local environment, a systems perspective is needed. Scientifically accurate meaningful understanding can and does come out of single lessons, single units, and single courses, but these understandings become richer, deeper, and more durable if they are connected across courses. The NGSS vision includes recognition that building a deep understanding of big ideas is both very important and a process that takes years of coordinated effort. Fortunately, the many processes that shape the local environment are part and parcel of existing curricula, and especially for Earth science, biology, and environmental science courses, nearly every unit has central aspects that play out on a human scale just outside the school door. A coordinated approach to the study of the local environment across units within a single course and across grade levels and courses can be a fairly subtle change in each teacher’s daily routines, but it has the potential for big returns in terms of the depth of student understanding. This deeper understanding pertains not only to the local environment and the way course topics are represented within it, but also to systems more generally, to the nature and importance of scale, and to much, much more.

"All Scientific and Engineering Practices and all Crosscutting Concepts in all courses,"

The above excerpt, and the document it draws from are focused broadly. They do not focus on particular Performance Expectations, Disciplinary Core Ideas, Crosscutting Concepts or Science and Engineering Practices but on the big picture vision of the NGSS, and on a systems- and research-based approach to effective science teaching. Considering how a particular teaching approach satisfies specific standards is important, but it is fairly easy to lose sight of larger goals and begin to treat those individual aspects of the Standards as a checklist. The larger goals include transforming K-12 science education so that high school graduates are prepared for the duties of citizenship, further education, and the workforce.

Under the heading, "All Scientific and Engineering Practices and all Crosscutting Concepts in all courses," Appendix K of NGSS notes, “The goal is not to teach the PEs, but rather to prepare students to be able to perform them by the end of the grade band course sequence.” To help keep focus on these larger goals, we suggest hanging posters of the NGSS's Crosscutting Concepts, Science and Engineering Practices and Disciplinary Core Ideas on your classroom walls and referring to them regularly. The University of Illinois' Project Neuron makes pdfs of such posters available here.

Incorporate the Crosscutting Concepts and Science and Engineering Practices into assignments regularly. One simple way to do that is to make questions about them a part of standard lab reports. This five-question lab summary offers an example of how to do that with a few straightforward questions. It includes a simple rubric, and is in Microsoft Word format so that it can be easily edited to suit teacher needs.

Of course, the Performance Expectations were developed for a reason. They, along with Evidence Statements (and other resources), give guidance on what NGSS-aligned instruction looks like. Excerpts of Evidence Statement, MS-ESS2-2 are below.

Excerpts of Evidence Statement: MS-ESS2-2. See the full Evidence Statement here and see the related Performance Expectations here (both documents are pdf).

The kind of science described in the example Performance Expectation and Evidence Statement can be well addressed by engaging in actual fieldwork exploring either outside your classroom door or through virtual fieldwork. And, this holds true for many, if not most, of the Performance Expectations within the NGSS. If looking at the level of Performance Expectation seems daunting, relax. Go back and look at the big picture ideas expressed within the Crosscutting Concepts and Science and Engineering Practices and consider how these are applied to the study of the environment. All of the guidance provided here is intended to support teaching that satisfies the NGSS, even if, or maybe especially if it is not focused on specific Performance Expectations.

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Using VFEs to foster rich discussion

We found the Ambitious Science Teaching Project's Discourse Primer for Science Teachers four high-level goals for talk resonate with our goals for the kind of conversations that VFEs should foster. These goals are shown below.

Eliciting students’ initial scientific hypotheses in order to plan for further instruction. The goal of this discourse is to draw out students’ understandings of a phenomenon (e.g. a bicycle rusting in the backyard) that is related to an important scientific idea (in this case chemical change or conservation of mass). After the lesson we analyze students’ ways of talking about it in order to adapt upcoming learning experiences.

Making sense of data/information. The goal here is to help students recognize patterns in data, critique the quality of data, and to propose why these patterns exist. What, for example, is going on at the unobservable level that explains our observations?

Connecting activities with big scientific ideas. The goal of this practice is to combine data-collection activities with readings and conversation in order to advance students’ understanding of a broader natural phenomenon. This conversation is different from the previous one, in that students are not trying to explain the outcome of an activity, but to relate the activity to a bigger science idea or puzzle that the unit is framed around.

Pressing students for evidence-based explanations. This discourse is designed to happen near the end of a unit, but elements of this conversation can also happen any time the teacher is trying to get students to talk about evidence. The goal of this discourse is to assist students in using multiple forms of evidence, gathered during a unit, to construct comprehensive explanations for a phenomenon that has been the focus of the unit.

From: A Discourse Primer for Science Teachers (p. 7). Available here.

Consider these goals as you explore and investigate your field sites - both the virtual one represented here, and any site local to your home or school. While they are labeled here as goals for talk, they reflect goals for the kind of thinking teachers, students, and other learners should engage in as they deepen their understandings of scientific ideas.

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Preview the VFE and consider what you will focus upon

Given that most or all of the units within a course play out in nearly every environment, fieldwork, whether real or virtual, can be a part of instruction in any unit. We suggest that you give attention to fieldwork in multiple units throughout your course, and draw comparisons between your local environment and the environments you visit virtually. Use fieldwork at the beginning of a course to establish the purpose of your investigations; interweave fieldwork throughout the course to highlight topics within each unit; and use fieldwork as a capstone to tie the course content together. Fieldwork may be used for any or all of these purposes, and it may make sense to choose one initial focus, especially if you have not led students in fieldwork previously. Remember that field scientists may visit the sites they research hundreds of times over their careers and continue to deepen their understandings with each visit.

Most VFEs that we’ve developed are customizable to teacher and student needs. Google Earth or Prezi files can be edited to allow focus on a particular feature in the landscape, or students may be directed to focus on specific topic. Generally, they also allow topics and questions to be investigated at different depths.

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1 Human physiology is a bit different than the rest of the units as it focuses on a single species.