Indicator Jigsaw Activity
There are many indicators that students can look at when first studying climate change—too many for each individual student to do alone. Instead, students can be broken up into small groups either randomly or by interest. Students should work together to understand and present these climate indicators. One way that this portion of the curriculum can be addressed is by completing a climate indicator jigsaw.
The EPA maintains a climate change indicators website that contains six major types of climate change indicators. Under each of these major indicator headers are sub-headers that link to raw data, graphs, and articles. Students should pick one sub-header or could be given a folder with two related sub-indicators of study. Individually, students will identify the trends in the data and how this connects with climate change.
Once students have individually looked at their indicator, they can join up with other peers in their climate change indicator group and share out. Amongst the group, students should come up with a poster or a short power-point presentation addressing the most important data that was presented in the group. Student groups can then share out to the whole class if time permits or student posters can be put up on a wall for a gallery walk where they gather additional data.
If this course is being completed in a physical science class or general biology where disease are not the focus but the teacher would like to show some of the direct implications for human health, the “Health and Society” section can be included as one of the sub-topics and shared out. Some additional time can be spent talking about human health connections and how they can be connected to the climate change indicators. In anatomy classes or other classes with a stronger biomedical focus, it may be best to remove that group from the survey and address those individual topics as a special focus or as a case study in the course.
Feedback Loop Practice
Feedback loops are an important concept for students who are in biology and anatomy to understand. Students who are studying climate change should also be familiar with feedback loops. One of the ways to give students additional practice is to give them some sample loops to work through.
First, students should be given a template of a positive and a negative feedback loop. Students need to understand that, in negative feedback loops, the conditions that stimulate the loop are inhibited by the outcome. In essence, this feedback loop will ‘return to normal’ and shut itself off until the next deviation. An example negative feedback loop may be like the following: I am thirsty. I put a quarter into the vending machine. The vending machine gives me a water bottle. I drink the water. I am no longer thirsty. In this example, the initial input of ‘thirst’ is cancelled by the ending output of drinking water and the loop stops.
A positive feedback loop is like a spiral staircase, moving someone away from the main floor either to a higher or lower level. In positive feedback loops the input is not resolved by the output. Instead, the output feeds into the input and continues the loop. An example positive feedback loop may be like the following: I am listening to my music while my roommate is talking to their friend. My roommate cannot hear over the music so they speak a little louder. I cannot hear my music so I turn my music up. In turn, my roommate and their friend speak a little louder. I turn my music up again since I can’t hear it. This set of events would continue, pushing the scenario further away from the normal volume. Usually in positive feedback loops there is a series of events that will ‘shut off’ the loop such as in the childbirth or lactation anatomy loops.
To begin studying feedback loops, begin by addressing the misconception that ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are words that deal with the outcome of the feedback. Many students assume that the ‘negative’ feedback loop is called that because it causes a negative outcome. One useful tool can be to remind students that Negative feedback loops are a return to Normal in this system. Students can practice making their own scenarios like the ones above and analyzing real world scenarios to identify if they are positive or negative.
Once students are confident with identifying positive and negative feedback loops, students can be handed an envelope with arrows and phrases and use those to construct feedback loops related to climate change. A good stretch activity would be to introduce an anthropogenic change into the system and have students identify how that might impact their feedback loop.
Case Studies
Case files and case studies are excellent ways to engage students in biology or anatomy courses as a way to introduce the connections between climate change and human health. Physical science teachers can also consider incorporating a case file as a way to provide some diversity or re-energize a course. These allow students to practice their critical thinking skills and their ability to support a claim with evidence and solid reasoning. Casefiles should include important patient history in addition to their blood temperature, respiration rates, blood pressure, and other important intake information. For students who do not have familiarity with health ranges, a reference chart can be provided or the information can be discussed as a group.
Students should begin by reading through the patient file and text coding. A recommended method for reading through the casefile is as follows. Initially have students read the file and box any terms that they do not understand. Students can then take time to look up those words to create a class vocabulary list for the patient. This is an excellent opportunity to introduce medical terminology and help students learn prefixes and roots that are commonly used in medicine.
Once students have completed this initial read through, they should complete a second pass through where they underline any symptoms that the patient is experiencing. These symptoms can be listed on small white boards as a group assignment or on the class white board if the case file is being worked through as an entire class. Students begin the third and final reading where they identify any other important information about the patient that can be helpful in identifying what is wrong with their patient. It may also be important to include information about the time of year that the patient has started to demonstrate symptoms. For example, if the patient has Lyme disease, you may write in your case file that the patient has been out in their garden during the spring or summer when they started to notice the symptoms.
Students then brainstorm illnesses that could be causing the symptoms using reliable sources to identify the cause of the illness. Students should always complete a written analysis of the symptoms of their patient including how those symptoms are directly tied in with the suspected illness. Furthermore, since many illnesses may present with similar symptoms, it is crucial that students identify alternative diagnoses and justify their decision to dismiss them. This is especially true for many of the arthropod transmitted viruses which have similar presentations in patients. This would be an excellent time to introduce tools like a nucleotide BLAST where students can input a piece of a DNA or an amino acid sequence obtained from the virus and compare it to known samples. Provide students with a sequence for the viral pathogen of choice that they can upload to determine the specific virus. BLASTS can be completed for free using the NCIB Nucleotide Blast databank.
An alternative method is to create an initial casefile where the patient is admitted to the hospital with some of the initial symptoms. The patient’s stats can change in ‘real time’ and crises can be included after certain periods of time. This format creates a sense of urgency as their patient becomes sicker and sicker. This particular set-up may be interesting to model N. fowleri where symptoms may start off mild and then rapidly progress.
A final suggestion is to create multiple interconnected case files with each diagnosing group receiving one or two. This sort of model is helpful for modeling an outbreak. Several patients with varying symptoms can be set up and teams must look for connections in symptoms, behaviors, and locations that may account for their illnesses. This sort of case file set-up is useful for a condition like CFP, where students need to trace the outbreak back to the source.
Predicted Ranges Activity
Modeling is an important skill for students to learn in high school science curriculum. This activity allows students to make predictions related to climate models and connections with possible changes on human health.
For this activity students should use local data if possible. Yale published a report providing local data based on different climate indicators specifically for Connecticut and the possible connections to human health.10 Students can also use their data from the indicator website by the EPA. In this activity, students should use the data to make predictions on what might happen for temperature, precipitation, or any other factor of interest. If students are looking at one ecosystem they should use a few measures including seasonal temperatures, precipitation, humidity, in addition to ecosystem specific indicators such as the surface temperature of freshwater or streamflow for inland aquatic environments or drought for inland areas. Students need to make a prediction of what will happen with regards to the environment by 2050 and 2100 if no major changes are made and they should justify their reasoning based on the trend data.
Once students have made their predictions about the possible changes to the indicators for their system they should predict what medical or human health implications would follow. For example, if students predict that an area will become more humid and warmer with increased precipitation, they may mention that they believe that there could be increased cases of West Nile virus or Eastern Equine Encephalitis as a result of larger mosquito populations.
Heat Island Effect Lab
One simple lab that can be used to discuss the idea of the heat island effect is to have students experiment with how different substances can trap heat. This lab would require some pre-planning about the time of implementation—it should be done on a sunny day, preferably in August/September when students are just returning to school or in May/June to best replicate what may happen during the summer months.
In this experiment, students should identify different surfaces that are in their city such as black or darkly colored asphalt, brick buildings, metal structures, plastic or wooden benches, concrete sidewalks, grassy areas. Students can use a surface temperature probe to get the temperature of the item and compare that to the ambient air temperature. If there are multiple sections of this class, temperatures can be taken throughout the day to create a better overall picture.
Students can also set up well insulated vs. poorly insulated ‘rooms’ using containers to see how insulation can be used as a preventative measure for heat conditions. If possible, remote temperature probes are ideal since the box can be sealed off while still allowing for students to obtain readings. Students can attempt to develop the ideal insulation for their room through the experimental design.
Project Based Solutions
More districts are moving towards project based assessments where students tackle real world problems and present those solutions to an authentic audience. Depending on if this curriculum is to be taught in a physical science course or a biological science course there are a number of project based assessments that students could approach.
The teacher would need to pick a relevant essential question or task that complements the content that they wish students to cover in their course. These questions should be not be just researchable— they should require students to engage their engineering design skills or come up with a strategy to employ.
For example, a teacher may want to focus on how urban areas and suburban areas can reduce mosquito breeding grounds in order to lower disease incidence rates. Students may approach this problem in different, authentic ways. One group may come up with an educational campaign to encourage people to turn over buckets or not leave out containers that may contain standing water. Another group may design a screen system that could go over rain barrels that will prevent mosquitoes from laying their eggs in these areas.
An essential question that asks how their city can reduce the number of patients who are brought into the hospital each year may look at a number of different factors from educational campaigns, to letters requesting the opening of additional cooling centers for the populations who are most at risk.
Once a topic or a question has been posed, students should spend some time completing some research and brainstorming into the question. Students should generate a list of questions they need to know the answers to in order to be successful. While older students may be able to complete this step on their own, younger students may need to do this as a guided practice with modeling.
The teacher should be careful to only provide students with information as it becomes necessary to facilitate furthering student projects. For example, students may have a question about how different materials in a city absorb heat. Rather than giving students information about how different substances absorb radiation, the teacher should generate activities that allow students to draw their own conclusions using experiences. In this particular example, the teacher can pull in a lab activity similar to the heat island one discussed above so students can gather data.