HomeWorld Educational Resources

The purpose of HomeWorld Educational Resources is to conduct research to better understand the psychological processes of how people learn and retain scientific fundamentals about Earth Systems. This research will then be employed to develop more effective Earth System Science (ESS) educational tools for K-12 teachers and students, fostering Earth Systems thinking in the classroom and self-learning settings. In this way, the corporation will contribute to a society better trained in key Earth System Science (ESS) processes, humankind’s impact on these ESS systems, and each citizen’s role in protecting these vital systems for future generations.

Dr. Ning Wang is the Director of Research and Tools for HomeWorld Educational Resources. He leads the tool design and assessment, research design and implementation, consultant coordination, and grant application. The Earth System Visual Learning (EasyVille) Tool is designed based on his research work on the "Google Earth Geoscience Video Library" (GEGVL) link. He led the tool development and design-based research for the first two versions of prototypes of EasyVille (GEGVL and Geoscience Video Library). The diverse background of Dr. Wang in Geosciences, Data Science, Education, and Arts allows him to communicate with stakeholders and effectively manage the EasyVille Project and research.

The Team Lead is Dr. Ning Wang (commitment to the LEAP project: ~20 hours a week). The primary supporting team members are Zach Clowdus and Steve Zheng (commitment to the LEAP project: >5 hours a week), and the secondary supporting team members are Dr. Yuning Qiu, Ali Salman and David Williamson (commitment to the LEAP project: 1 ~ 2 hours per week). The Team Lead, Dr. Ning Wang, will attend all the required meetings. He will also take responsibility for project management, reports, and coordination. Zach Clowdus will support Ning on his tasks as well as content production. Steve Zheng will help with the technical part of the tool development and technical-related tasks for the LEAP project. The secondary supporting team members will join the meetings and provide their computer science/Geoscience expertise as needed.

Visualizing actual events, features, relationships, and abstract concepts in a virtual Earth system environment to foster children's Earth Systems thinking.

We are living in and interacting with Earth systems every day. Understanding Earth systems is critical for creating earth-science-minded citizens and forming a sustainable society. Thus, Earth Systems education is considered one of the most needed subjects in K-12 education and has been embedded in curriculum standards. However, there is still no ideal tool for teachers to teach Earth systems in formal education or for children to self-study Earth systems in informal educational settings. The proposed platform is a promising tool to fill this gap.

Our solution builds on differences and learning variabilities that are unique to the individual. Children have different interests and curiosities about their world. Whether it be an interest in dinosaurs, historical events, or the rocks around their neighborhood, this natural curiosity provides an opportunity to motivate children to learn scientific topics about the Earth actively. Therefore, we try to maximize the number of ways to explain the same topic and increase the number of topics with an intuitive organization of this information so that a child can easily navigate among them and choose the ones they like to start their learning adventure in the proposed virtual system. Moreover, this process allows us to get various data types, such as logs as well as results from embedded tests and questionnaires. The log data will show how children use the platform, such as what material they select and how long they spend learning it. In addition to the tests and adaptive prompt-based questionnaires, the data will allow us to understand a child's unique interests, the relationships between topics, learning styles, prior domain knowledge, and ways of thinking. We seek to understand how individual students choose to learn and how they attain an understanding of Earth science topics. 

Concentrate on Grade 4 to 6 (Ages 6-12) students.

Foundational research:  

•- Literature Review (including systematically summarizing the existing methods for teaching Earth Systems science and developing Earth Systems thinking. Evaluated their advantages/disadvantages and implementing situations)

•- Desktop Research (we have an insight into existing products and solutions for Earth systems education, as well as current status, policies, and standards about Earth systems education in K-12 schools.)

•- Informal discussion with / pitch the idea to k-12 teachers,  District workers, NSF staff, and educational researchers (early-stage user experience research to get feedback from potential stakeholders).

•- Open datasets (data from NAEP Report Card about Science in Grade 4 and Grade 8).

Formative Research: 

•- Feasibility studies. We surveyed K-12 Science Teachers (accumulative n = 45) in workshops at Conference for the Advancement of Science Teaching (CAST) from 2020 to 2022). The questionnaire includes school/district info, curriculum matching, implementing difficulties, the tool's usefulness, and other comments.

•- User surveys. We surveyed the intro-level geoscience classes students (N=71) about their experience using the GEGVL beta version at the University of Texas at Dallas. The survey includes demographic info, academic info, personal interest questions, tool feedback, and additional comments. For more details of the results, please see this paper: 

Wang, Ning, Robert J. Stern, Mary L. Urquhart, and Katherine M. Seals. 2022. "Google Earth Geoscience Video Library (GEGVL): Organizing Geoscience Videos in a Google Earth Environment to Support Fieldwork Teaching Methodology in Earth Science" Geosciences 12, no. 6: 250. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences12060250

The questionnaire is accessible at: https://redcap.link/UTDGSS-S2. 

A short demonstration video showing how GEGVL works: https://youtu.be/yE1qq2RImW0

Google Earth-based Geoscience video library (GEGVL) is the prototype for the product we are trying to develop. This tool was first tested among undergraduate students. The surveys about lower-division undergraduate students provided valuable feedback to understand how people with little geoscience background use and think about the tool.

After then, we revised it to serve the K-12 classrooms. Unlike undergraduate students, the internet and computer access rate of K-12 students is very different. The differences have been shown in our literature review results and confirmed by the data reported from NAEP, NSF NCSES, and Census. For K-12 students and teachers, the flexibility to use the platform's downloadable desktop and online versions could be important. Therefore, we use Google Earth Pro because it is a well-known and easily installed software for K-12 teachers to test/give feedback on the prototype. 

The survey results show that all students agreed that the GEGVL helped them develop a more holistic view of Earth science knowledge (63 strongly agree, eight agree). Seventy students liked the GEGVL (68 strongly agreed and two agreed), and only one did not. These results show that most students considered GEGVL a good tool for classes (90% strongly agreed) and self-learning (82% strongly agreed).  

The most frequent positive feedback we received included: (1) the abundance of place-based videos (mentioned 35 times), (2) exploration of geographic features (32 times), (3) easy to use (23 times), (4) provide a "big picture" of Earth that allowed them to feel the connections between things and events (19 times), and (5) geographic context for Earth science knowledge (18 times). 

The most frequently mentioned negative feedback includes:  “have to download the app” (mentioned 15 times); “The details that are given as highlights on the map rather than icons can be hard to see, and an alternate method for seeing a list of all content in a browsable format would be helpful.”; and “There is so much information about Earth sciences out there that watching all the possible topic videos would be difficult.” In addition, some comments mentioned that GEGVL is unnecessary and no better than a Google search for the needed topics.

The summarized survey results from 45 science teachers in Texas and informal discussions with stakeholders include the following:
(1) About 80% of surveyed teachers think Earth systems education is an important topic, and they are looking for better solutions to teach the topic.
(2) Not all schools are flexible enough to provide resources for teachers to try new technologies.
(3) The tool aligns with their curriculum.
(4) About one-third of surveyed teachers would like to try to use the tool in their classroom.
(5) All surveyed teachers think the tool is easy-to-implement (if Google Earth Pro has already been approved to be installed on their computers) but still need help to get started.
(6) There are concerns about internet-access or computer-access issues using the tool as a self-learning tool/assignment for students.
(7)There are features and technical problems of Google Earth Pro and the online version of Google Earth that may make it difficult to achieve the potential of the GEGVL model fully.

Based on the feedback, we are developing an online platform using CesiumJS and creating a whole new design to achieve the full potential of the GEGVL model. The current developing platform aims to solve the existing limitations and surveyed concerns. 

As mentioned in the previous section, we are trying to develop a new platform based on stakeholders' feedback about the Google Earth-based Geoscience Video Library (GEGVL) model. This is currently our organization's first and only product. This product will serve as the foundation for our future projects and services. Our current priority is to raise enough money and resources to build and maintain the platform. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, we aim to apply for government grants and get funding from interested foundations. To do so, we need to have solid plans about how to get evidence to test the effectiveness of the theories behind the proposed tool. We will design experiments to get evidence to inform us and the funders about the causal relationship between potential factors and different types of learners' performance (e.g., how children get engaged and gain learning outcomes differently). LEAP project will provide on-time support to these goals. We would like to have more feedback and ideas from LEAP fellows and work with them to 

(1) get more feedback about the tool design, 

(2) plan to collect data using the proposed solution to identify learning variability, 

(3) create convincing experimental designs, 

(4) discuss the potential research methods,

(5) generate experimental materials (e.g., questionnaires or surveys). 

Three research questions are listed below: 

(1)What are Earth systems science's commonly misconceived concepts and corresponding ontological issues for different learners (e.g., different backgrounds, cultures, interests, learning abilities, family statuses, or economic differences)?

(2)When conceptual changes happen (i.e., students learned well) for a certain group of children, how does the change happen among that group while using this tool? 
(especially seeking the causal explanation between the design factors and the group cognitive features/behaviors/performances)

(3)Why are some misconceived ideas about Earth Systems resistant to change for certain groups of students and how is it related to the differences in the children's ontology/strategies/motivations?

The expected outputs include the following: 

(1) Recommendations/suggestions about the experimental design/methods. Especially in regards to the comprehensive utilization of the log, survey, tests, and other data types. Discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of different plans. The criteria might include feasibility, technical challenges, as well as the limitation and significance of the experimental results. We hope to create an experiment to give insights into the causal explanation between the design factors and students' features/behaviors/performances. This may take 4-6 weeks.

(2) Development of critical experimental materials (such as surveys or test questions) based on the practical plan. We want to discuss the bias and potential of questions, observations, or assessments that can be implemented in our tool. Such discussion will improve the quality of the data that we collected. This process can take the rest of the time.

(3) If we have time left, we would like to hear more about the general ideas/suggestions about getting evidence to support the proposed tool development for better identifying and supporting children with different learning preferences while using the proposed tool.

Using the outputs (experimental design and related materials), we will develop the proposal to apply for grants (e.g., Department of Education, National Science Foundation). A possible grant is the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) NSF program.

Before the grant application, we will try to do a pilot study with the LEAP fellow-generated plan or materials with some of the Texas middle school science teachers who expressed their interest in our research in our past teacher surveys. The feedback from the pilot study will also help us create a more convincing research proposal and guide the tool design.

If we get any recommendations for tool development, we will try to turn the ideas into trial functions/services.

•The short-term outcomes of the LEAP project sprint for the solution include:

(1) A solid experimental design for assessing the effectiveness of the developing tool and examining the causal effects between the features of students and different strategies of utilizing the tool.

(2) Getting feedback about or developing the design of critical supportive materials to test the solution in a pilot study.

(3) Gaining insights about the future tool design or implementation.

•The short-term outcomes of the LEAP project sprint for the organization include:

(1) The opportunity to work and discuss with LEAP fellows will help the HomeWorld Ed Res.'s research team development.

(2) The valuable experience will give our organization's members confidence in the solution and the organization's ability.

•The long-term outcomes for the solution: 

With the early feedback and support from the LEAP project sprint, the proposed solution would have a more solid foundation. With better research on the learning variability of children using our tool, we have a better chance to increase the success rate of the future implementation of the tool in K-12 schools and even the general public.

•The long-term outcomes for the organization:

The LEAP project could increase the potential of our proposal to gain the first grant money, which is critical for HomeWorld Educational Resource's survival and future growth.