Ask Matt: Episode 5
In this episode “Dissecting an NGSS standard”, Matt discusses the connection between student achievement and teaching, and how teachers can make progress with NGSS. We then dive into one of the standards and Matt takes us on a tour of how he would approach teaching this standard. As usual, we also discuss the environment, and how to help students and teachers find credible information about topics like climate change.
Listen to Episode 5 of ‘Ask Matt’ on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or below:
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Teachers Grapple with Climate Change: 'A Pretty Scary Topic'
The transcript of the episode is also provided below.
[Intro music]
Eugene: Hello and welcome to ‘Ask Matt’. I’m Eugene Cordero, professor of meteorology and climate science from San Jose State University, and Founder and Director of Green Ninja. Green Ninja is an educational initiative where students use science and engineering to solve real world environmental problems.
I’m here with Matt d’Alessio, geology professor from Cal State Northridge and chief author of the 2016 California Science Framework. Matt has dedicated over 20 years of his life to science education, is a national expert on how to make science learning effective and engaging. Matt was a high school science teacher, runs a sustainability education program at an elementary school, and spent a year as a stay-at-home dad. Matt cares deeply about the environment and he’s also recently received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Cal State Northridge.
I met Matt about three years ago and he agreed to help our team at Green Ninja with advice as we created our own Next Generation Science Standards curriculum. Today we are an approved science publisher in California, in large part because of Matt’s guidance and advice. We all learned a ton from our work with Matt, and I thought it would be great to share some of his wisdom and insights with others. So here we are.
The format is I ask Matt about a range of subjects from NGSS and science teaching to professional training and science content. And hopefully, we all learn something about how to make this transition to NGSS easier and more rewarding both for teachers and students.
If you have any of your own questions, just send them to info@greenninja.org and I’ll share some of them with Matt in a future episode. So let’s get started. Thanks for joining us today, Matt. Nice to have you here.
Before we get started, do you have any news to share with us, Matt? I mean, we’ve been kind of following along with your wife’s campaign and it seems like it’s just a couple weeks out.
Matt: It’s just very exciting coming down to the finish. We’ve got people going door to door daily. My little daughter-- two year old daughter and I go out every night after we have our dinner, and we may knock on maybe 10 or 20 houses in our neighborhood and just trying to get people out to realize that there’s some real change to be had for the better and that they need to get out and vote. So we’re coming down to the wire. We’ll keep you posted!
Eugene: Great. Well, we’re excited and it’s been fun to kind of share in this journey with you and your family.
So let’s start with NGSS and I want to ask you a very kind of basic question. How important are teachers to student success in learning science?
Matt: Well, we can all come up with great anecdotes of examples of teachers that inspired us or that where we-- if we were a teacher, a student that we had keeps coming back to us and telling us how much they inspired us. But of course, as a scientist, we’d like to have data about this and really not just use the anecdotes, which are certainly meaningful and certainly powerful, but there actually are some really interesting studies about teachers and how important they are. And it turns out that it’s not necessarily the teacher him or herself, but it’s what the teacher does.
And so, for example, there’s a very large study that Harvard did about what factors lead to success in college science based upon what high school teachers are doing, so it’s looking at what behaviors high school teachers have and trying to figure out which of those translate to success. So I’m looking here at one of their papers that are published that they have some of the things that I think are most notable. I’m gonna start off with my favorite, which is teachers described as average friendliness or less lead to higher success in college, so being--
Eugene: Average friendliness or less. [laughs]
Matt: Being a really nice teacher is actually not correlated with success, the future success of your students. Do the teachers matter? Yes, but it’s not because they’re friendly. And so, for example here, teachers that are spending less time using textbooks and reading within their science classrooms, particularly this is from a physics context. But I think this is true across the board in the sciences that our textbooks are our crutches that we tend to use poorly, and so teachers that release themselves from those crutches often end up doing better with their students and inspire their students to do better things.
The other really notable thing that a teacher can choose to do is really going in depth into a smaller number of topics, spending more than a month on a particular topic. It’s considered to be a effective practice that a teacher can do, really giving their students a chance to dig into things. And when you try and go or the full breath of stuff, that tends to hurt our students. So teachers do make a difference, but it’s not necessarily because of who they are in the sort of friendliness context. It’s what they’re doing with their students and there’s some caveats to that that are really important that we can talk about, I think maybe later, but overall, that’s our bottom line.
Eugene: Anyhow, that’s a great summary of thinking and I know that even in my own teaching in university and looking at the subjects that I was supposed to teach that over years and over reflection, I’ve started to do less and in more detail -- that has been the goal, and finding that maybe that’s more impactful and rewarding for students than trying to get through all the content. And I don’t know if you found that in your own teaching practice as well.
Matt: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just spending more time-- you know, all these things we learned about questioning strategies where we’re getting our students to think deeply about things that requires us to actually invest the time to do those. And so, you know, it could be that when we spend more time on a fewer number of subjects, we’re also doing all those other things that are effective to our teaching as well.
Eugene: And I think we’ve talked about this before and we’ll probably go back to it at some point later as well, about time and we hear this a lot with the teachers we work with is, you know, all this stuff sounds great and this open ended and giving students some autonomy and what they learn or how they learn, but it takes time, and how am I supposed to get through all the content and these and all the standards?
Matt: And the research shows that, you know, the way to get your students to be most successful in the future as scientists is not to try and give them everything. It’s to try and give them things done well.
Eugene: So anyhow, I think that was really helpful, and kind of following along with that, right now the NSTA is doing their STEM Expo in San Francisco. I was up there yesterday at a booth for Green Ninja and I had a chance to talk to quite a few teachers, and I was actually a little pleasantly surprised they’re mostly teachers from outside of California, the ones that I was chatting with and many of them are new to NGSS. They would say, “Oh, I don’t really know much about it. We haven’t done that so much.” And so, I’m wondering what key points would you have for helping teachers get started with these new standards.
Matt: Well, I always like to ask teachers why they became a teacher of science and why they became a teacher in general, especially if they’re teaching multiple subjects. And the answer is because they love discovering things about science and learning new things about science and they love seeing those clicking aha moments in their students when their students get those things. And so, I feel like when we just try and deliver content to our students, we are cheating them out of those aha moments and cheating ourselves out of them as well because, you know, we’re the experts and we convey it and we’re not learning anything new and our students aren’t discovering anything themselves.
And so, NGSS basically unlocks that whole situation so that we can actually discover things together and really do what we love best about science, which is learning new stuff and discovering new things. And we can get that for our students by having them do a lot of the discovery and we can get that for ourselves by really tackling some real world problems that we may not have done the learning in our classrooms when we were doing our teacher preparation. So, I feel like that’s the starting point is that this is liberating for us. It’s exciting to us and it’s energizing and from that, everything else is going to follow. And there’s a lot of details to all these practices, crosscutting concepts, and huge number of acronyms and alphabet soup, which boils down to helping make science more like science.
Eugene: Yeah, and the way you describe it, it makes it sound like it’d be much more fun to teach in that way.
Matt: That’s our hope, that our teachers are going to be energized by that sort of thing does rub off on our students when they see that. When we’re curious, they become more curious and that is also supported by research.
Eugene: Yeah, and in terms of the teachers that you’ve been working with and the folks that do the professional training with middle and high school teachers, over time are you seeing your teachers kind of self-enjoyment of their practice increase?
Matt: Well, there’s-- yeah, there’s a couple different categories of teachers. There’s a lot of teachers that are still in the deer in the headlights afraid of what’s coming and not really sure exactly how to approach it. So, those teachers are not yet enjoying things because there’s a lot more work and they’re afraid of that, and rightly so because who has the time for it and we’re asking them to do-- we’re asking them to do too much, and I think we talked about that before--
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: But the teachers that are digging in and are getting time from their admin, from summertime where they’re getting paid during the summer to actually dig in and try stuff, they are really excited about it because they get to create lessons that have to do with things that are really interesting to them. So yes, we are seeing that once teachers are given the time and resources that they need to actually do it, but otherwise, it’s still daunting. I’m with them on that.
Eugene: Yeah, and I’m interested in how you’re mentioning the importance of, you know, district support or support from their school to give folks the time to be able to, like you said, to dig into this. And that’s part of what we’re here to do too is to dig into some of these subjects and hopefully help in some small way. So I thought we would jump into a standard and we kind of take it apart.
So, this is ESS1-3 and this is a performance expectation that says, “Analyze and interpret data to determine scale properties of objects in the solar system.” And one of the things I have to admit that I like about the performance expectations is that they’re usually just one sentence but I think pretty well, carefully written, so there’s actually a lot in there. So can you help us with that one? Like, what’s in there and what will we do with that?
Matt: Alright, so I’m going to read it again slowly because they’re dense, these performance expectations. There’s only one sentence, but a lot of information packed in. So, “analyze and interpret data”, that should sound familiar. It’s our science practice, so we’re going to be focusing in on that, analyzing and interpreting the data practice. “To determine scale properties”, so there’s our word ‘scale’, that’s one of our crosscutting concepts. And then, “objects in the solar system” is our disciplinary core idea.
So every one of these performance expectations has those three parts -- the blue, the green, and the orange. And we’ve got this performance expectation here. It’s got those three parts, and we’re a little bit confused. What exactly does that all mean? Well, we are not alone.
Eugene: [laughs]
Matt: --and there’s something [inaudible] always that will help us out. And the very first place when I look at a new performance expectation that I’ve got is, I go to these evidence statements that Achieve has put together and they are PDFs that are maybe one or two pages that describe a little bit more that unpack this performance expectation of what we need to know.
So, I happen to have the evidence statement for MS ESS1-3 in front of me, and it talks about what our students need to be able to do. They need to first be able to-- there’s three categories that they need to do in this one that are related to that practice of analyzing and interpreting data. The first one is organizing data. They need to be able to look at real data and come up with some way to organize it into tables, into pictures, into graphs. That’s the first step of things. The second part of that is that once they’re looking at that organized data, they need to be able to identify some sort of patterns, relationships, similarities, differences, all those sort of things that they’re going to be doing. And the last thing that they need to do is to be able to sort of come up with some story from those patterns.
And so, for this particular one, I’m going to jump on my evidence statement down to the idea of three-- actually, I’m going to-- here at the identifying relationships. So what sort of data should our students be looking at? And the evidence statement gives us some tips on that and they’re even sort of Roman numeral bulleted out here. We should be looking at the distance of objects from the sun, the diameter of those objects. We should be looking at what features are on there. Do they have volcanoes and how big are those volcanoes? What are they, those objects, made out of? Their composition, are they made of ice versus gas? So, these are the types of data we should be looking at.
And so, when we’re looking at that, we need to be able to figure out, “Okay. What are the most important relationships?” And there’s so many in here that when one is doing this in the one’s classroom, one is probably not trying to do all these relationships at once-- I just read you-- looks like there are five Roman numeral types of data sets that we would want to have here. And maybe we’ll look at just, especially in the middle school, just two of those at a time. So, how about distance from the sun versus the diameter of the object? And if you’ve looked at planets, for example, you know that the planets that are closest to the sun are little and the ones far from the sun are big. And that’s what we want our students to be able to recognize is, “Hey, look at that. When I line up all my planets and I show the ones close to the sun, they’re all really tiny. And when they’re far away, they’re going to get bigger.”
We could do the same thing with distance from the sun and composition. We could look at objects like asteroids, which in our solar system, tend to be sort of the middle of our solar system in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And they all have a composition. It’s made out of rock basically, pure rock. But if you look at comets, they’re kind of similar in size, but they orbit much further away on average from the sun than our asteroids do. The distance from the sun is very different and their composition is also very different. They’ve got a lot of ice. So, once you start recognizing those relationships, you start asking the questions like, “Why? What’s going on there?”
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: Trying to come up with stories that might help explain that. “Well, I know that the distance from the sun, it’s got to be hotter when you’re closer to the sun. Maybe that has something to do with it.” And you can start coming up with explanations and stories. So, this is-- essentially, what we’re looking at here is we’ve taken a classic non-NGSS activity, which is the scale model of the solar system where you might walk out on your football field or on a sidewalk or register tape or any of these things where you’re looking at the planets and how far apart they are.
Well, that’s just sort of the starting point of the distance with them. We’re not doing that. We’re doing more than that. We’re looking at relationships between two variables here, the distance from the sun and something else that’s going on there. And that’s a little bit richer than simply just the mathematics of how big is the solar system and how far apart are these things. We’re not just going there. We’re trying to say there’s a relationship between how far they are from the sun and what those things actually look like.
Eugene: I like how you-- thanks for doing that and how you kind of took us through this, you know, seemingly simple one sentence statement. Looked at the evidence statements that accompany the standards and we’ll provide a link to one of them in the notes so folks can take a look at that. And I know that even our team at first, we weren’t really looking at the evidence statements too closely. But when you look at them, also you don’t have to do every single thing that’s in there-- every single subcategory because there’s-- I actually find the evidence statements sometimes even a little overwhelming. There’s a ton of stuff in there.
Matt: You know, like I said, there’s five bullet points in that thing we need to come up with relationships for at the middle school levels. Oh my gosh, I can’t keep five balls in the air at once, so please don’t do that. And we’re zooming into one particular phenomenon at a time is the idea.
Eugene: Right, and [inaudible] good context and some good ideas. But I like how it mentions about a story too about, you know, like what are we looking at, and then idea of it, you know, traditionally we might have taught this with putting a picture up of the solar system and where the different planets are. But they were really looking for relationships and that can induce some questions about, well, I wonder why the planets are smaller the closer they are to the sun. And that’s, you know, an important piece of this.
Matt: One should probably also add in here that the burden of the explanation of the answer-- like, why is it?-- we don’t necessarily need our students to have that full explanation in middle school. That’s not part of our performance expectation. We are looking at the data, discovering those patterns, and just basically saying, “Huh, I see something. I wonder if this might be true.” But our students don’t need to have that answer nailed down yet. When they get to high school, they’ll get a further answer to it and get a little more detail. But really, this is about noticing the phenomenon, noticing the patterns, and just being intrigued by them and wondering maybe it’s this, and that’s where we stop in middle school.
Eugene: Yeah, and I think that for a teacher to realize that, that they don’t have to have all the answers to every pattern that a student or their students might have identified, that hopefully are somewhat comforting.
Matt: Yeah. Like, why are volcanoes so big on Mars? That’s another scale thing and dimensions in the evidence statement. And I actually had a friend in grad school who was trying to answer that question, using some fancy computer simulations of crazy stuff. And so, you’re not expected to do that. Your middle school students are not expected to do that, but you do need to get to the point where your students are noticing, “Hey, the volcanoes on Mars are a heck of a lot bigger than they are here on Earth. Why is that?”
Eugene: Yeah, that’s a great story for us to kind of keep in our memory that we don’t know all the answers to these, but it’s important to be able to identify.
I’d like to pick your brain a little bit about when you were developing as one of the authors to the NGSS for California, the Science Framework. And I was curious about how the state came up with the sequence of standards for each grade band because as I was talking to teachers yesterday from different states, states get to choose how they take the middle school standards, which are lumped in six-seven-eight and distribute them, either have no recommendations, say, “Oh, you can teach them in any order you want,” or as California did and said, “This is what’s for grade six, this is for grade seven and grade eight. And how would that-- how are those decisions made in California?
Matt: Well. So just to clarify that the-- you described it correctly, which is that California has identified which performance expectations go in sixth, but within sixth grade, no order is specified. I want to make sure that our listeners understand that once you enter the grade six realm, you get freedom over what order and sequence you want to do.
But the question about how did we come up with what got slotted into grade six, this happened before our framework. If somebody were adopting our standards and they could be-- I don’t know exactly how many people there were, but the science expert panel-- you can look this up online and find out it’s just a group of teachers and professional developers and scientists and got together trying to look at the NGSS standards and performance expectations as they were presented nationally. And we are by law in California required to specify what goes on in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. So that’s why we had to do that, according to our statutes. And they looked at them, they argued about them and put them in a certain order based upon the thing that seemed reasonable to that group of people at that time.
And I think-- I forgot if I talked about it much on this podcast, but you and I have talked a lot about it. I’m not personally in favor of the sequencing that they chose for what goes into sixth grade, what goes into seventh, and what goes into eighth. My biggest pet peeve is about climate change. The most complex and rich interdisciplinary topic is inserted into our sixth grade standards when it needs to be taken at the level of eighth grade, where our students have more maturity and can integrate more of their prior knowledge. And so, that’s my personal opinion. I was not on the science expert panel at the time.
And so, it was a consensus that was reached by that group and they could point to any particular-- if you had a question about a particular standard, I’m sure they could explain what the logic was they had at the time and it made sense and it was internally consistent. And one of the things I can comment on is you can see a lot of-- we’ll call it vestigial effects of the 1998 standards of what was in sixth grade before, we didn’t deviate a huge amount in the preferred integrated model from that. There was some--
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: --in sixth and seventh and eighth. They tried to keep, I think, a lot of that as much as they-- not as much as they could but they put-- they kept a lot of that in there. I think a little bit too much, and a little bit more than they should have in my personal opinion. But that, I think, was part of their thing, partly because we recognize that too much change is not worthwhile. And in the-- we’ve also talked about that in the end, sequencing is not really where you win NGSS. The power of NGSS is not in the specific sequencing at the level of this level. And so, I think they tried to decrease the amount of shock and change that might have been part of their--
Eugene: Oh okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. And because I noticed that there’s-- that when you look at the three years, you know, you see a lot in some way, there is a bit of an emphasis on earth science in sixth grade and life science in seventh grade and physical science in eighth grade, although it’s integrated, but you could still feel that in some regard.
So anyhow, that is interesting and so, if any of our listeners have particular questions that we know how-- where they can find the folks who were the committee who made those decisions. And, you know, we all make decisions in the best light at that time. But as you said, that’s not really the power of NGSS, that’s what we’re working with right now.
The next question I wanted to ask you about, and I think we just touched upon it before, but it’s about textbooks and their role in science learning, and obviously many of us learn science happily and maybe somewhat effectively, or not, with textbooks at our side. And one of my colleagues here at Green Ninja says, “I love textbooks. Those are my favorite books to read.” But can you tell us about their role in science learning and can you learn science without a textbook?
Matt: Oh, I think we just saw the research showing that in fact the textbook sometimes impedes our science learning and that’s a very consistent pattern. We are definitely trying to push our teachers, in my professional development, away from using their textbook partly because most textbooks are constructed in a way that they give the answers often up front.
And I think I have talked with you about an example from one of the publishers in California where they start with a phenomenon. They have this beautiful phenomenon-- I think it was trees that were all dead in a forest, and the very first line of this chapter-- I saw that, I was like, “Oh, that’s a perfect-- that’s a great anchoring phenomenon for that particular topic that they’re addressing. I’m so excited to see where they go with this.” And the very first line was, “These trees all died because of acid rain.” It was like, “What! That’s the mystery that we’re supposed to solve and you, in the very first line, solve the mystery for us,” and that’s a poorly designed textbook for NGSS.
And so, what we need our students to be doing is looking at data, trying to figure out what caused that to happen, and maybe presenting them with a couple different options and seeing if they can find data to support one option or the other. And that’s what we need to do, and that often isn’t presented very well in a textbook. And so, we’re definitely pushing our teachers to use other curriculum materials and we want to be clear that the State of California has this lawsuit-- the Williams Act-- based on the Williams Act that requires that we have high quality curriculum materials. It does not require textbooks. It requires high quality curriculum materials for every student.
Eugene: And that can be accessed in different--
Matt: Modalities, but they do not need to look like a textbook or even an ebook. That is not required. It needs to be curriculum materials and we want to make sure our students have access to doing science well and not just reading books.
Eugene: Following up with that out, one thing that some folks have been asking us about is a teacher’s edition. So not necessarily a textbook. I mean, we’re-- we have an online portal for teachers, but not a printed teacher’s edition. Any thoughts about that?
Matt: Sure, I mean, if teachers are interested in having something that they can flip through-- I love flipping through things as well, and it’s just another way to access the information. It loses some of the cool hyperlinking and, you know, a lot of times we want to be able to hover over something and see more information and it’s harder to do that on a piece of paper where you’re confined by the space there and kind of getting that hierarchical-- like on a computer, you can have the big picture overview and then you can click on something and zoom it on a certain part and it will have pop up a box with more detail. So I’m happy doing that and I feel like you benefit from that many times. But if teachers want to have a piece of paper in front of them that has some of the answers and some of the scripts and some of the things, you know, annotated graphs of what the graph should look like in the end after their students are doing stuff, that’s a reasonable thing.
Of course, the other aspect, though, is that there are a broader range of correct responses now than, perhaps, there used to be under our old standards. You know, when students are constructing explanations, there might be a much broader range of acceptable ones where they’ve got good-- you’ve got a claim that might be a completely scientifically inaccurate claim, but if they’ve got evidence and reasoning that backs it up, that’s right! That is what science is, and it just so happens that some professional scientist has got more evidence and can counteract whatever their claim was. But for your classroom, that’s something we have to recognize and I feel like having a teacher’s edition where you feel like there’s a right answer might be a little bit detrimental to our teaching--
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: --assess, and so, it’s just that spirit of ‘I have this book that has the answer in it.’ That’s what something we want to go away from that philosophy.
Eugene: Yeah, and I-- you’re always very pro-teacher, Matt, and understanding the teachers. So that’s-- we are feeling the same thing, and if the teacher wanted a printed-- we’re calling it a Teacher Companion and it provides most of the materials that’s online, and if you-- for planning or for while you’re teaching, having a printed copy next to you helps you, then we think, “Okay, let’s create that.” We’re in the middle of, or just finishing up that right now. But we don’t also have so many of those scripts about what we should say at every point and what should be the answer, so.
Okay, so I’d like to shift to our next section, which is about climate and the environment, and in particular, we look at issues related to climate change and the latest news in this area, and talk about how to bring such topics into our schools and classrooms. And I was attracted by an article that came out last month, titled “Teachers Grapple With Climate Change: ‘A Pretty Scary Topic,’” and that outlined how teachers across the country are describing the struggles they have to find trustworthy materials to help them teach climate change. So, you know, how can we help teachers, and more importantly, how can we help teachers find credible information and how can we help students also find trustworthy information online? I wonder if you have any advice.
Matt: Yeah, there’s definitely information literacy about things and it’s very hard. There’s-- within climate change, there’s a lot of what we call ‘pseudoscience,’ which is stuff that looks very scientific. It has data, it has graphs, it has evidence in it, talks about reasoning, but it’s oftentimes we call it ‘cherry picked data,’ where you’ve taken out a little tiny section of the climate record and said, “Look. Look how it’s not warming,” and it’s true. In that little section, it’s not warming, but it’s your-- you know, you’re not doing things, and so, it’s very hard to find stuff that is reliable. And so really, what you have to do is start by looking at the sources and just going to sources that we know are trustworthy.
Going to-- a lot of times our US government sites are responsible scientists that are going up there, and even though we hear about political interference in this that’s happening to a small degree, scientists stick up for themselves, and we really do see high quality information coming out of government sites and that can be the first place that one goes to. And so, sort of just steering ourselves toward certain types of resources and not just going to the first thing that Google recommends is a good starting point.
Eugene: And probably for all areas of science to be thinking along those way.
Yeah, definitely. And I do hear-- I had a teacher one time tell me, “Can you just--” we were talking about climate change and she said, “Oh, I’m concerned that one of the parents might come and say, ‘Oh, you’re teaching my child this propaganda.’ I’d like to have, like, this list of credible sources of the science that we’re teaching.” And so, we came up with a list that came from NASA and it came from EPA and it came from some governmental reports. And so, we were moving in that direction and she felt a little bit more comfortable with that.
Matt: One of my favorite sort of tools for evaluating information-- this is something that some of the CSU libraries passed around to us and I’m not sure where it originated, but it’s called the CRAAP Test.
Eugene: [laughs]
Matt: C-R-A-A-P, and you can Google that. And it looks to see-- the C stands for current: Is the information current? R is relevant: Is it relevant to what you’re trying to figure out? The A is authority: Who’s the author or creator? What are their credentials and are they reputable? Do they have a known bias that you can think of? Accuracy is the second A, and that’s a little bit harder to get out of your novice trying to figure out, but you can look for-- trying to see things that-- do they have editors or fact checkers, or is this a single person that has put this up without any filter at all? So, you know, newspapers tend to be better than blogs for accuracy as that because they have at least one more layer of checking. And then P stands for the purpose of this thing: What sort of purpose was this original work that you’re looking at designed to do? Is it designed to be an impartial news story, or is it designed to be a persuasive piece?
And so, when you’re evaluating things who use this CRAAP test, it’s a very useful tool for us all to be thinking about and internalizing.
Eugene: I love it and maybe we can put that into our curriculum because I think students would like that acronym as well.
So, the final thing for this episode is I do like to talk about the general topic of burritos. And early on, Matt and I discovered that this was more than the many things we both enjoyed. And it may be surprising but the subject of burritos isn’t so far away from science, at least in my world and the field of education and the environment.
So Matt, as you know, in some of the Green Ninja videos, I play the role of Dr. Burrito, interrogating the carbon footprint of different types of burritos or creating analogies between the spiciness of burritos and the variability of weather and climate as an example. It’s been fun and perhaps provides a good learning experience for our viewers. And I’m wondering, Matt, have you ever used the subject of burritos in any of your own teaching?
Matt: I have not actually used burritos specifically. I do a lot of things with food, but I-- believe it or not, despite our clear affinity or burritos, I have not actually used it.
Eugene: That’s okay. I’m just gonna put you on the spot now. This’ll be fun. You know you have a deep background in science but geology being your specialty, can you think of any way to connect a burrito with some type of geology phenomenon or instruction?
Matt: Oh, definitely. That’s an easy one. We can go to look at when you’re holding a burrito. Imagine you’re holding a burrito. And your hands, you know they’re sensitive to heat, right? And it’s not too hot. But then you bite into the burrito and it’s too hot to eat. My daughter, little two year old, does this all the time where she bites in, “Too hot, too hot!” and spits it out and it’s very messy. So what’s going on there? This is not too different than what happens if you were to bite into the earth and slice the earth. Our center of our Earth is very hot and the outside is much cooler, and what’s going on there is just like the burrito and all the stuff started out hot. You know, at my burrito place, they put the tortilla in this little heating machine-- you know, this little press and it’s hot! But it cools off much quicker because it’s exposed to the cool air, or the cool outer space in the case of the Earth, and the stuff in the center, it’s taking time to get that heat to flow outwards.
And so, we’re very much seeing, as you drill down into the earth, it’s hot, man. The deepest mines in South Africa, the temperatures there are 150-200 degrees Fahrenheit in some cases at the bottom of those mines 24/7. Like, it’s always that hot and it’s just because you are basically getting down to the places where it hasn’t had a chance to cool enough in on Earth and--
Eugene: Getting deeper into that burrito.
Matt: Getting deeper into that burrito and the center of that burrito is the hottest part.
Eugene: That’s a great analogy. I love it, and I’m thinking about scale and thinking about temperature and heat and energy transfer. So, see everyone? See how important burritos are to science learning? I think [laughs] that’s the moral of the story and I think--
Matt: --properties of the different hotness and heat -- a bit of the tomatoes versus the onions and the pico de gallo, so. [laughs]
Eugene: There you go. So anyhow, I think that’s a good place to stop for this episode. Thanks for joining us at ‘Ask Matt’, where we explore NGSS, science education, and the environment with education expert and nice guy, Matthew d’Alessio. Thanks for joining us today, Matt, and we’ll see you next time.
Matt: Thank you. See ya.
[Outro music]
Eugene: Hello and welcome to ‘Ask Matt’. I’m Eugene Cordero, professor of meteorology and climate science from San Jose State University, and Founder and Director of Green Ninja. Green Ninja is an educational initiative where students use science and engineering to solve real world environmental problems.
I’m here with Matt d’Alessio, geology professor from Cal State Northridge and chief author of the 2016 California Science Framework. Matt has dedicated over 20 years of his life to science education, is a national expert on how to make science learning effective and engaging. Matt was a high school science teacher, runs a sustainability education program at an elementary school, and spent a year as a stay-at-home dad. Matt cares deeply about the environment and he’s also recently received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Cal State Northridge.
I met Matt about three years ago and he agreed to help our team at Green Ninja with advice as we created our own Next Generation Science Standards curriculum. Today we are an approved science publisher in California, in large part because of Matt’s guidance and advice. We all learned a ton from our work with Matt, and I thought it would be great to share some of his wisdom and insights with others. So here we are.
The format is I ask Matt about a range of subjects from NGSS and science teaching to professional training and science content. And hopefully, we all learn something about how to make this transition to NGSS easier and more rewarding both for teachers and students.
If you have any of your own questions, just send them to info@greenninja.org and I’ll share some of them with Matt in a future episode. So let’s get started. Thanks for joining us today, Matt. Nice to have you here.
Before we get started, do you have any news to share with us, Matt? I mean, we’ve been kind of following along with your wife’s campaign and it seems like it’s just a couple weeks out.
Matt: It’s just very exciting coming down to the finish. We’ve got people going door to door daily. My little daughter-- two year old daughter and I go out every night after we have our dinner, and we may knock on maybe 10 or 20 houses in our neighborhood and just trying to get people out to realize that there’s some real change to be had for the better and that they need to get out and vote. So we’re coming down to the wire. We’ll keep you posted!
Eugene: Great. Well, we’re excited and it’s been fun to kind of share in this journey with you and your family.
So let’s start with NGSS and I want to ask you a very kind of basic question. How important are teachers to student success in learning science?
Matt: Well, we can all come up with great anecdotes of examples of teachers that inspired us or that where we-- if we were a teacher, a student that we had keeps coming back to us and telling us how much they inspired us. But of course, as a scientist, we’d like to have data about this and really not just use the anecdotes, which are certainly meaningful and certainly powerful, but there actually are some really interesting studies about teachers and how important they are. And it turns out that it’s not necessarily the teacher him or herself, but it’s what the teacher does.
And so, for example, there’s a very large study that Harvard did about what factors lead to success in college science based upon what high school teachers are doing, so it’s looking at what behaviors high school teachers have and trying to figure out which of those translate to success. So I’m looking here at one of their papers that are published that they have some of the things that I think are most notable. I’m gonna start off with my favorite, which is teachers described as average friendliness or less lead to higher success in college, so being--
Eugene: Average friendliness or less. [laughs]
Matt: Being a really nice teacher is actually not correlated with success, the future success of your students. Do the teachers matter? Yes, but it’s not because they’re friendly. And so, for example here, teachers that are spending less time using textbooks and reading within their science classrooms, particularly this is from a physics context. But I think this is true across the board in the sciences that our textbooks are our crutches that we tend to use poorly, and so teachers that release themselves from those crutches often end up doing better with their students and inspire their students to do better things.
The other really notable thing that a teacher can choose to do is really going in depth into a smaller number of topics, spending more than a month on a particular topic. It’s considered to be a effective practice that a teacher can do, really giving their students a chance to dig into things. And when you try and go or the full breath of stuff, that tends to hurt our students. So teachers do make a difference, but it’s not necessarily because of who they are in the sort of friendliness context. It’s what they’re doing with their students and there’s some caveats to that that are really important that we can talk about, I think maybe later, but overall, that’s our bottom line.
Eugene: Anyhow, that’s a great summary of thinking and I know that even in my own teaching in university and looking at the subjects that I was supposed to teach that over years and over reflection, I’ve started to do less and in more detail -- that has been the goal, and finding that maybe that’s more impactful and rewarding for students than trying to get through all the content. And I don’t know if you found that in your own teaching practice as well.
Matt: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just spending more time-- you know, all these things we learned about questioning strategies where we’re getting our students to think deeply about things that requires us to actually invest the time to do those. And so, you know, it could be that when we spend more time on a fewer number of subjects, we’re also doing all those other things that are effective to our teaching as well.
Eugene: And I think we’ve talked about this before and we’ll probably go back to it at some point later as well, about time and we hear this a lot with the teachers we work with is, you know, all this stuff sounds great and this open ended and giving students some autonomy and what they learn or how they learn, but it takes time, and how am I supposed to get through all the content and these and all the standards?
Matt: And the research shows that, you know, the way to get your students to be most successful in the future as scientists is not to try and give them everything. It’s to try and give them things done well.
Eugene: So anyhow, I think that was really helpful, and kind of following along with that, right now the NSTA is doing their STEM Expo in San Francisco. I was up there yesterday at a booth for Green Ninja and I had a chance to talk to quite a few teachers, and I was actually a little pleasantly surprised they’re mostly teachers from outside of California, the ones that I was chatting with and many of them are new to NGSS. They would say, “Oh, I don’t really know much about it. We haven’t done that so much.” And so, I’m wondering what key points would you have for helping teachers get started with these new standards.
Matt: Well, I always like to ask teachers why they became a teacher of science and why they became a teacher in general, especially if they’re teaching multiple subjects. And the answer is because they love discovering things about science and learning new things about science and they love seeing those clicking aha moments in their students when their students get those things. And so, I feel like when we just try and deliver content to our students, we are cheating them out of those aha moments and cheating ourselves out of them as well because, you know, we’re the experts and we convey it and we’re not learning anything new and our students aren’t discovering anything themselves.
And so, NGSS basically unlocks that whole situation so that we can actually discover things together and really do what we love best about science, which is learning new stuff and discovering new things. And we can get that for our students by having them do a lot of the discovery and we can get that for ourselves by really tackling some real world problems that we may not have done the learning in our classrooms when we were doing our teacher preparation. So, I feel like that’s the starting point is that this is liberating for us. It’s exciting to us and it’s energizing and from that, everything else is going to follow. And there’s a lot of details to all these practices, crosscutting concepts, and huge number of acronyms and alphabet soup, which boils down to helping make science more like science.
Eugene: Yeah, and the way you describe it, it makes it sound like it’d be much more fun to teach in that way.
Matt: That’s our hope, that our teachers are going to be energized by that sort of thing does rub off on our students when they see that. When we’re curious, they become more curious and that is also supported by research.
Eugene: Yeah, and in terms of the teachers that you’ve been working with and the folks that do the professional training with middle and high school teachers, over time are you seeing your teachers kind of self-enjoyment of their practice increase?
Matt: Well, there’s-- yeah, there’s a couple different categories of teachers. There’s a lot of teachers that are still in the deer in the headlights afraid of what’s coming and not really sure exactly how to approach it. So, those teachers are not yet enjoying things because there’s a lot more work and they’re afraid of that, and rightly so because who has the time for it and we’re asking them to do-- we’re asking them to do too much, and I think we talked about that before--
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: But the teachers that are digging in and are getting time from their admin, from summertime where they’re getting paid during the summer to actually dig in and try stuff, they are really excited about it because they get to create lessons that have to do with things that are really interesting to them. So yes, we are seeing that once teachers are given the time and resources that they need to actually do it, but otherwise, it’s still daunting. I’m with them on that.
Eugene: Yeah, and I’m interested in how you’re mentioning the importance of, you know, district support or support from their school to give folks the time to be able to, like you said, to dig into this. And that’s part of what we’re here to do too is to dig into some of these subjects and hopefully help in some small way. So I thought we would jump into a standard and we kind of take it apart.
So, this is ESS1-3 and this is a performance expectation that says, “Analyze and interpret data to determine scale properties of objects in the solar system.” And one of the things I have to admit that I like about the performance expectations is that they’re usually just one sentence but I think pretty well, carefully written, so there’s actually a lot in there. So can you help us with that one? Like, what’s in there and what will we do with that?
Matt: Alright, so I’m going to read it again slowly because they’re dense, these performance expectations. There’s only one sentence, but a lot of information packed in. So, “analyze and interpret data”, that should sound familiar. It’s our science practice, so we’re going to be focusing in on that, analyzing and interpreting the data practice. “To determine scale properties”, so there’s our word ‘scale’, that’s one of our crosscutting concepts. And then, “objects in the solar system” is our disciplinary core idea.
So every one of these performance expectations has those three parts -- the blue, the green, and the orange. And we’ve got this performance expectation here. It’s got those three parts, and we’re a little bit confused. What exactly does that all mean? Well, we are not alone.
Eugene: [laughs]
Matt: --and there’s something [inaudible] always that will help us out. And the very first place when I look at a new performance expectation that I’ve got is, I go to these evidence statements that Achieve has put together and they are PDFs that are maybe one or two pages that describe a little bit more that unpack this performance expectation of what we need to know.
So, I happen to have the evidence statement for MS ESS1-3 in front of me, and it talks about what our students need to be able to do. They need to first be able to-- there’s three categories that they need to do in this one that are related to that practice of analyzing and interpreting data. The first one is organizing data. They need to be able to look at real data and come up with some way to organize it into tables, into pictures, into graphs. That’s the first step of things. The second part of that is that once they’re looking at that organized data, they need to be able to identify some sort of patterns, relationships, similarities, differences, all those sort of things that they’re going to be doing. And the last thing that they need to do is to be able to sort of come up with some story from those patterns.
And so, for this particular one, I’m going to jump on my evidence statement down to the idea of three-- actually, I’m going to-- here at the identifying relationships. So what sort of data should our students be looking at? And the evidence statement gives us some tips on that and they’re even sort of Roman numeral bulleted out here. We should be looking at the distance of objects from the sun, the diameter of those objects. We should be looking at what features are on there. Do they have volcanoes and how big are those volcanoes? What are they, those objects, made out of? Their composition, are they made of ice versus gas? So, these are the types of data we should be looking at.
And so, when we’re looking at that, we need to be able to figure out, “Okay. What are the most important relationships?” And there’s so many in here that when one is doing this in the one’s classroom, one is probably not trying to do all these relationships at once-- I just read you-- looks like there are five Roman numeral types of data sets that we would want to have here. And maybe we’ll look at just, especially in the middle school, just two of those at a time. So, how about distance from the sun versus the diameter of the object? And if you’ve looked at planets, for example, you know that the planets that are closest to the sun are little and the ones far from the sun are big. And that’s what we want our students to be able to recognize is, “Hey, look at that. When I line up all my planets and I show the ones close to the sun, they’re all really tiny. And when they’re far away, they’re going to get bigger.”
We could do the same thing with distance from the sun and composition. We could look at objects like asteroids, which in our solar system, tend to be sort of the middle of our solar system in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And they all have a composition. It’s made out of rock basically, pure rock. But if you look at comets, they’re kind of similar in size, but they orbit much further away on average from the sun than our asteroids do. The distance from the sun is very different and their composition is also very different. They’ve got a lot of ice. So, once you start recognizing those relationships, you start asking the questions like, “Why? What’s going on there?”
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: Trying to come up with stories that might help explain that. “Well, I know that the distance from the sun, it’s got to be hotter when you’re closer to the sun. Maybe that has something to do with it.” And you can start coming up with explanations and stories. So, this is-- essentially, what we’re looking at here is we’ve taken a classic non-NGSS activity, which is the scale model of the solar system where you might walk out on your football field or on a sidewalk or register tape or any of these things where you’re looking at the planets and how far apart they are.
Well, that’s just sort of the starting point of the distance with them. We’re not doing that. We’re doing more than that. We’re looking at relationships between two variables here, the distance from the sun and something else that’s going on there. And that’s a little bit richer than simply just the mathematics of how big is the solar system and how far apart are these things. We’re not just going there. We’re trying to say there’s a relationship between how far they are from the sun and what those things actually look like.
Eugene: I like how you-- thanks for doing that and how you kind of took us through this, you know, seemingly simple one sentence statement. Looked at the evidence statements that accompany the standards and we’ll provide a link to one of them in the notes so folks can take a look at that. And I know that even our team at first, we weren’t really looking at the evidence statements too closely. But when you look at them, also you don’t have to do every single thing that’s in there-- every single subcategory because there’s-- I actually find the evidence statements sometimes even a little overwhelming. There’s a ton of stuff in there.
Matt: You know, like I said, there’s five bullet points in that thing we need to come up with relationships for at the middle school levels. Oh my gosh, I can’t keep five balls in the air at once, so please don’t do that. And we’re zooming into one particular phenomenon at a time is the idea.
Eugene: Right, and [inaudible] good context and some good ideas. But I like how it mentions about a story too about, you know, like what are we looking at, and then idea of it, you know, traditionally we might have taught this with putting a picture up of the solar system and where the different planets are. But they were really looking for relationships and that can induce some questions about, well, I wonder why the planets are smaller the closer they are to the sun. And that’s, you know, an important piece of this.
Matt: One should probably also add in here that the burden of the explanation of the answer-- like, why is it?-- we don’t necessarily need our students to have that full explanation in middle school. That’s not part of our performance expectation. We are looking at the data, discovering those patterns, and just basically saying, “Huh, I see something. I wonder if this might be true.” But our students don’t need to have that answer nailed down yet. When they get to high school, they’ll get a further answer to it and get a little more detail. But really, this is about noticing the phenomenon, noticing the patterns, and just being intrigued by them and wondering maybe it’s this, and that’s where we stop in middle school.
Eugene: Yeah, and I think that for a teacher to realize that, that they don’t have to have all the answers to every pattern that a student or their students might have identified, that hopefully are somewhat comforting.
Matt: Yeah. Like, why are volcanoes so big on Mars? That’s another scale thing and dimensions in the evidence statement. And I actually had a friend in grad school who was trying to answer that question, using some fancy computer simulations of crazy stuff. And so, you’re not expected to do that. Your middle school students are not expected to do that, but you do need to get to the point where your students are noticing, “Hey, the volcanoes on Mars are a heck of a lot bigger than they are here on Earth. Why is that?”
Eugene: Yeah, that’s a great story for us to kind of keep in our memory that we don’t know all the answers to these, but it’s important to be able to identify.
I’d like to pick your brain a little bit about when you were developing as one of the authors to the NGSS for California, the Science Framework. And I was curious about how the state came up with the sequence of standards for each grade band because as I was talking to teachers yesterday from different states, states get to choose how they take the middle school standards, which are lumped in six-seven-eight and distribute them, either have no recommendations, say, “Oh, you can teach them in any order you want,” or as California did and said, “This is what’s for grade six, this is for grade seven and grade eight. And how would that-- how are those decisions made in California?
Matt: Well. So just to clarify that the-- you described it correctly, which is that California has identified which performance expectations go in sixth, but within sixth grade, no order is specified. I want to make sure that our listeners understand that once you enter the grade six realm, you get freedom over what order and sequence you want to do.
But the question about how did we come up with what got slotted into grade six, this happened before our framework. If somebody were adopting our standards and they could be-- I don’t know exactly how many people there were, but the science expert panel-- you can look this up online and find out it’s just a group of teachers and professional developers and scientists and got together trying to look at the NGSS standards and performance expectations as they were presented nationally. And we are by law in California required to specify what goes on in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. So that’s why we had to do that, according to our statutes. And they looked at them, they argued about them and put them in a certain order based upon the thing that seemed reasonable to that group of people at that time.
And I think-- I forgot if I talked about it much on this podcast, but you and I have talked a lot about it. I’m not personally in favor of the sequencing that they chose for what goes into sixth grade, what goes into seventh, and what goes into eighth. My biggest pet peeve is about climate change. The most complex and rich interdisciplinary topic is inserted into our sixth grade standards when it needs to be taken at the level of eighth grade, where our students have more maturity and can integrate more of their prior knowledge. And so, that’s my personal opinion. I was not on the science expert panel at the time.
And so, it was a consensus that was reached by that group and they could point to any particular-- if you had a question about a particular standard, I’m sure they could explain what the logic was they had at the time and it made sense and it was internally consistent. And one of the things I can comment on is you can see a lot of-- we’ll call it vestigial effects of the 1998 standards of what was in sixth grade before, we didn’t deviate a huge amount in the preferred integrated model from that. There was some--
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: --in sixth and seventh and eighth. They tried to keep, I think, a lot of that as much as they-- not as much as they could but they put-- they kept a lot of that in there. I think a little bit too much, and a little bit more than they should have in my personal opinion. But that, I think, was part of their thing, partly because we recognize that too much change is not worthwhile. And in the-- we’ve also talked about that in the end, sequencing is not really where you win NGSS. The power of NGSS is not in the specific sequencing at the level of this level. And so, I think they tried to decrease the amount of shock and change that might have been part of their--
Eugene: Oh okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. And because I noticed that there’s-- that when you look at the three years, you know, you see a lot in some way, there is a bit of an emphasis on earth science in sixth grade and life science in seventh grade and physical science in eighth grade, although it’s integrated, but you could still feel that in some regard.
So anyhow, that is interesting and so, if any of our listeners have particular questions that we know how-- where they can find the folks who were the committee who made those decisions. And, you know, we all make decisions in the best light at that time. But as you said, that’s not really the power of NGSS, that’s what we’re working with right now.
The next question I wanted to ask you about, and I think we just touched upon it before, but it’s about textbooks and their role in science learning, and obviously many of us learn science happily and maybe somewhat effectively, or not, with textbooks at our side. And one of my colleagues here at Green Ninja says, “I love textbooks. Those are my favorite books to read.” But can you tell us about their role in science learning and can you learn science without a textbook?
Matt: Oh, I think we just saw the research showing that in fact the textbook sometimes impedes our science learning and that’s a very consistent pattern. We are definitely trying to push our teachers, in my professional development, away from using their textbook partly because most textbooks are constructed in a way that they give the answers often up front.
And I think I have talked with you about an example from one of the publishers in California where they start with a phenomenon. They have this beautiful phenomenon-- I think it was trees that were all dead in a forest, and the very first line of this chapter-- I saw that, I was like, “Oh, that’s a perfect-- that’s a great anchoring phenomenon for that particular topic that they’re addressing. I’m so excited to see where they go with this.” And the very first line was, “These trees all died because of acid rain.” It was like, “What! That’s the mystery that we’re supposed to solve and you, in the very first line, solve the mystery for us,” and that’s a poorly designed textbook for NGSS.
And so, what we need our students to be doing is looking at data, trying to figure out what caused that to happen, and maybe presenting them with a couple different options and seeing if they can find data to support one option or the other. And that’s what we need to do, and that often isn’t presented very well in a textbook. And so, we’re definitely pushing our teachers to use other curriculum materials and we want to be clear that the State of California has this lawsuit-- the Williams Act-- based on the Williams Act that requires that we have high quality curriculum materials. It does not require textbooks. It requires high quality curriculum materials for every student.
Eugene: And that can be accessed in different--
Matt: Modalities, but they do not need to look like a textbook or even an ebook. That is not required. It needs to be curriculum materials and we want to make sure our students have access to doing science well and not just reading books.
Eugene: Following up with that out, one thing that some folks have been asking us about is a teacher’s edition. So not necessarily a textbook. I mean, we’re-- we have an online portal for teachers, but not a printed teacher’s edition. Any thoughts about that?
Matt: Sure, I mean, if teachers are interested in having something that they can flip through-- I love flipping through things as well, and it’s just another way to access the information. It loses some of the cool hyperlinking and, you know, a lot of times we want to be able to hover over something and see more information and it’s harder to do that on a piece of paper where you’re confined by the space there and kind of getting that hierarchical-- like on a computer, you can have the big picture overview and then you can click on something and zoom it on a certain part and it will have pop up a box with more detail. So I’m happy doing that and I feel like you benefit from that many times. But if teachers want to have a piece of paper in front of them that has some of the answers and some of the scripts and some of the things, you know, annotated graphs of what the graph should look like in the end after their students are doing stuff, that’s a reasonable thing.
Of course, the other aspect, though, is that there are a broader range of correct responses now than, perhaps, there used to be under our old standards. You know, when students are constructing explanations, there might be a much broader range of acceptable ones where they’ve got good-- you’ve got a claim that might be a completely scientifically inaccurate claim, but if they’ve got evidence and reasoning that backs it up, that’s right! That is what science is, and it just so happens that some professional scientist has got more evidence and can counteract whatever their claim was. But for your classroom, that’s something we have to recognize and I feel like having a teacher’s edition where you feel like there’s a right answer might be a little bit detrimental to our teaching--
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: --assess, and so, it’s just that spirit of ‘I have this book that has the answer in it.’ That’s what something we want to go away from that philosophy.
Eugene: Yeah, and I-- you’re always very pro-teacher, Matt, and understanding the teachers. So that’s-- we are feeling the same thing, and if the teacher wanted a printed-- we’re calling it a Teacher Companion and it provides most of the materials that’s online, and if you-- for planning or for while you’re teaching, having a printed copy next to you helps you, then we think, “Okay, let’s create that.” We’re in the middle of, or just finishing up that right now. But we don’t also have so many of those scripts about what we should say at every point and what should be the answer, so.
Okay, so I’d like to shift to our next section, which is about climate and the environment, and in particular, we look at issues related to climate change and the latest news in this area, and talk about how to bring such topics into our schools and classrooms. And I was attracted by an article that came out last month, titled “Teachers Grapple With Climate Change: ‘A Pretty Scary Topic,’” and that outlined how teachers across the country are describing the struggles they have to find trustworthy materials to help them teach climate change. So, you know, how can we help teachers, and more importantly, how can we help teachers find credible information and how can we help students also find trustworthy information online? I wonder if you have any advice.
Matt: Yeah, there’s definitely information literacy about things and it’s very hard. There’s-- within climate change, there’s a lot of what we call ‘pseudoscience,’ which is stuff that looks very scientific. It has data, it has graphs, it has evidence in it, talks about reasoning, but it’s oftentimes we call it ‘cherry picked data,’ where you’ve taken out a little tiny section of the climate record and said, “Look. Look how it’s not warming,” and it’s true. In that little section, it’s not warming, but it’s your-- you know, you’re not doing things, and so, it’s very hard to find stuff that is reliable. And so really, what you have to do is start by looking at the sources and just going to sources that we know are trustworthy.
Going to-- a lot of times our US government sites are responsible scientists that are going up there, and even though we hear about political interference in this that’s happening to a small degree, scientists stick up for themselves, and we really do see high quality information coming out of government sites and that can be the first place that one goes to. And so, sort of just steering ourselves toward certain types of resources and not just going to the first thing that Google recommends is a good starting point.
Eugene: And probably for all areas of science to be thinking along those way.
Yeah, definitely. And I do hear-- I had a teacher one time tell me, “Can you just--” we were talking about climate change and she said, “Oh, I’m concerned that one of the parents might come and say, ‘Oh, you’re teaching my child this propaganda.’ I’d like to have, like, this list of credible sources of the science that we’re teaching.” And so, we came up with a list that came from NASA and it came from EPA and it came from some governmental reports. And so, we were moving in that direction and she felt a little bit more comfortable with that.
Matt: One of my favorite sort of tools for evaluating information-- this is something that some of the CSU libraries passed around to us and I’m not sure where it originated, but it’s called the CRAAP Test.
Eugene: [laughs]
Matt: C-R-A-A-P, and you can Google that. And it looks to see-- the C stands for current: Is the information current? R is relevant: Is it relevant to what you’re trying to figure out? The A is authority: Who’s the author or creator? What are their credentials and are they reputable? Do they have a known bias that you can think of? Accuracy is the second A, and that’s a little bit harder to get out of your novice trying to figure out, but you can look for-- trying to see things that-- do they have editors or fact checkers, or is this a single person that has put this up without any filter at all? So, you know, newspapers tend to be better than blogs for accuracy as that because they have at least one more layer of checking. And then P stands for the purpose of this thing: What sort of purpose was this original work that you’re looking at designed to do? Is it designed to be an impartial news story, or is it designed to be a persuasive piece?
And so, when you’re evaluating things who use this CRAAP test, it’s a very useful tool for us all to be thinking about and internalizing.
Eugene: I love it and maybe we can put that into our curriculum because I think students would like that acronym as well.
So, the final thing for this episode is I do like to talk about the general topic of burritos. And early on, Matt and I discovered that this was more than the many things we both enjoyed. And it may be surprising but the subject of burritos isn’t so far away from science, at least in my world and the field of education and the environment.
So Matt, as you know, in some of the Green Ninja videos, I play the role of Dr. Burrito, interrogating the carbon footprint of different types of burritos or creating analogies between the spiciness of burritos and the variability of weather and climate as an example. It’s been fun and perhaps provides a good learning experience for our viewers. And I’m wondering, Matt, have you ever used the subject of burritos in any of your own teaching?
Matt: I have not actually used burritos specifically. I do a lot of things with food, but I-- believe it or not, despite our clear affinity or burritos, I have not actually used it.
Eugene: That’s okay. I’m just gonna put you on the spot now. This’ll be fun. You know you have a deep background in science but geology being your specialty, can you think of any way to connect a burrito with some type of geology phenomenon or instruction?
Matt: Oh, definitely. That’s an easy one. We can go to look at when you’re holding a burrito. Imagine you’re holding a burrito. And your hands, you know they’re sensitive to heat, right? And it’s not too hot. But then you bite into the burrito and it’s too hot to eat. My daughter, little two year old, does this all the time where she bites in, “Too hot, too hot!” and spits it out and it’s very messy. So what’s going on there? This is not too different than what happens if you were to bite into the earth and slice the earth. Our center of our Earth is very hot and the outside is much cooler, and what’s going on there is just like the burrito and all the stuff started out hot. You know, at my burrito place, they put the tortilla in this little heating machine-- you know, this little press and it’s hot! But it cools off much quicker because it’s exposed to the cool air, or the cool outer space in the case of the Earth, and the stuff in the center, it’s taking time to get that heat to flow outwards.
And so, we’re very much seeing, as you drill down into the earth, it’s hot, man. The deepest mines in South Africa, the temperatures there are 150-200 degrees Fahrenheit in some cases at the bottom of those mines 24/7. Like, it’s always that hot and it’s just because you are basically getting down to the places where it hasn’t had a chance to cool enough in on Earth and--
Eugene: Getting deeper into that burrito.
Matt: Getting deeper into that burrito and the center of that burrito is the hottest part.
Eugene: That’s a great analogy. I love it, and I’m thinking about scale and thinking about temperature and heat and energy transfer. So, see everyone? See how important burritos are to science learning? I think [laughs] that’s the moral of the story and I think--
Matt: --properties of the different hotness and heat -- a bit of the tomatoes versus the onions and the pico de gallo, so. [laughs]
Eugene: There you go. So anyhow, I think that’s a good place to stop for this episode. Thanks for joining us at ‘Ask Matt’, where we explore NGSS, science education, and the environment with education expert and nice guy, Matthew d’Alessio. Thanks for joining us today, Matt, and we’ll see you next time.
Matt: Thank you. See ya.
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