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This presentation was given at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) in February of 2015.

Explore the Powerpoint to learn more about the Ocean Tracks project, including background information, goals, and findings to-date.

This presentation at AAAS' 2015 Annual Meeting focused on how  teachers and instructional materials can help students transition from working with small, student-collected datasets to large, complex, professionally collected datasets. Strategies include minimizing extraneous information and maximizing insight-rich information in the data visualizations; leveraging the skill set that students bring with them from working with self-collected data; and practicing the use of spatial, temporal and quantitative reasoning to connect claims with evidence.

Supporting students' work with authentic data requires a carefully developed and rigorously-tested curriculum to help them understand what the data represent, and to guide them in how to use data analysis tools and visualizations to identify meaningful patterns and develop evidence-based hypotheses.

Research has shown that spatial thinking is important in science in general, and in Earth Science in particular, and that performance on spatially demanding tasks can be fostered through instruction. Because spatial thinking is rarely taught explicitly in the U.S...

About 20 years ago, psychologist Lynn Liben presented an model of the relationships among a learner, an external (i.e. not mental) representation, and those aspects of the real world represented by the representation (the “referent”). Liben notes that the learner can learn either through direct interactions with the real world or through interactions with a representation.

This paper describes our current thinking on pervasive and persistent understandings about data

Presentation at American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco, December 2013

Keynote Address, IBM's Big Data and Analytics EdCon 2013, November 2, Las Vegas

The world is awash with data. This growth of data shows no signs of slowing, and indeed seems to be accelerating. Analyzing data, spotting patterns, and extracting useful information have become gateway skills to full participation in the workforce and civic engagement of the 21^st century. Yet pre-college classrooms are falling short of preparing students for this world. And they’re missing the opportunity to harness the power of big data to transform student learning.

This poster presented the first results from Principal Scientist Kim Kastens’ collaborative grant on “Making Meaning from Geoscience Data: A Challenge at the Intersection between Geosciences and Cognitive Sciences.” ...

This talk was one of a related paper set emerging from a project researching how teachers teach and students learn Earth Science using physical models. Kastens’ contribution was a theory paper exploring how scientists use physical models and computational models to create new knowledge at the frontiers of science...