Engineering a Healthier Watershed: Middle School Students Use Engineering Design to Lessen the Impact of Their Campus' Impervious Surfaces on Their Local Watershed

Abstract

It is important that students understand not only how their local watershed functions, but also how it is being impacted by impervious surfaces. Additionally, students need experience exploring the scientific and engineering practices that are necessary for a strong STEM background. With this knowledge students can be empowered to tackle this real and local problem using engineering design, a powerful practice gaining momentum and clarity through its prominence in the recent Framework for K-12 Science Education. Twenty classes of suburban sixth-graders participated in a new five-week Watershed Engineering Design Unit taught by their regular science teachers. Students engaged in scientific inquiry to learn about the structure, function, and health of their local watersheds, focusing on the effects of impervious surfaces. In small groups, students used the engineering design process to propose solutions to lessen the impact of runoff from their school campuses. The goal of this evaluation was to determine the effectiveness of the curriculum in terms of student gains in understanding of (1) watershed function, (2) the impact of impervious surfaces, and (3) the engineering design process. To determine the impact of this curriculum on their learning, students took multiple-choice pre-and post-assessments made up of items covering the three categories above. This data was analyzed for statistical significance using a lower-tailed paired sample t-test. All three objectives showed statistically significant learning gains and the results were used to recommend ii improvements to the curriculum and the assessment instrument for future iterations.

Focus on a STEM, Based in Place, Watershed Curriculum: A confluence of stormwater, humans, knowledge, attitudes, and skills

“…It is interesting to note that the 2014 increase in scores on the PPT (Table 4) from a mean of 7.51 to 12.74 mirror the results of 7.9 and 12.0 from the previous year's analysis of the piloted OLWEDU (Gardner 2013). Both of these increases would be considered positive outcomes by researchers, Stern, et al (2013).…”

“…and the Posttest mean score was 12.0 (Gardner 2013). Therefore for the remainder of this analysis, when comparing Posttest scores and the results from the other instruments, I…”

“…Consequently, some colleges and universities have collaborated with nearby school districts and watershed councils (Austin, 2012;Beatty, 2008;Eflin, 2006;Stagner, 2013) to provide standards-based curricula and assistance, as is the case with the particular construct of this study, the Owl Lake Watershed Engineering Design Unit (OLWEDU) (Gardner, 2013;Meinershagen, 2014). One problem noted of some curricula is the fact that, "school based science education primarily occurs in the classroom without including student experiences in the outdoors, even when its focus is on the natural world" (Carrier, 2013(Carrier, p. 2060.…”