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Project Summary
This project consists of four separate modules that can be used in high school science courses to introduce students to environmental issues and key topics in understanding the local watershed. These modules describe several possible lines of inquiry into the process and a particular problem for investigation. They provide a beginning point from which many other areas may be defined and investigated. Chemistry is one party of this process. The desired results go beyond the generation of numbers from chemical analysis and consequently include understanding of the process of design, gathering of skills, cause and effect relationships, and change of behaviors to reflect the findings of such a study.
Chemists are careful to define a system which is under study, classically the contents of a reaction vessel to be reacted to form products. They are interested in understanding both the products formed and the process by which they are formed. A reaction system is carefully isolated from its surroundings so that specific questions can be asked and answers revealed through testing, modification and retesting.
Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 Astronaut said “it’s so incredibly impressive when you look back at our planet from out there in space and you realize so forcibly that it’s a closed system,…we don’t have any unlimited resources, that there’s only so much air and so much water.” When we exit the lab and attempt to apply the lessons learned in laboratory, the system being studied becomes the surrounding. To have success in the question and answer process of scientific inquiry we must attempt to understand the system being studied. Environmental Study requires an understanding of many related disciplines. Biology, geography, hydrology, human psychology and chemistry are each parts of human attempts at understanding physical reality.
This group of modules includes
suggestions of pertinent chemical concepts to be used in the process. It is left to individual teachers to decide
how they will present these concepts. In
delimiting the surroundings to a system to be studied, the skills of watershed
mapping are introduced with some basic mapping skills in the first module.
The second module involves land use.
Activities within a land area define contaminants contained within
it. Therefore, to assist in the
understanding of the current state of the watershed under study a historical
perspective is generated. Starting with
the assumption of undisturbed natural landscape or small agricultural
population amid primarily forested areas, students analyze the types of changes
in land use brought by a growing and expanding human population. Students are asked to evaluate the changes by
using a chemist’s perspective to deduce the types of chemical changes likely to
have occurred within the watershed.
In the third module, an environmental problem is introduced for study. Milfoil was chosen as it is a problem with which students have some familiarity since many have had an encounter while swimming and there is a great amount of information available. Students are asked to research the topic using web-based data sources and present possible solutions in posters, pamphlets and oral presentations. The fourth module involves wet chemistry. Students are asked to create a Quality Assurance Project Plan (QAPP) which includes quality assurance rationale, sampling techniques, water testing and reporting. Sites for water sampling are chosen by their proximity to the school and ongoing community projects. Tests are conducted both on site using probe ware and in the lab using basic water test kits. Samples could also be sent to a local water quality testing lab for analysis so that student’s efforts will contribute to the data stream of our community efforts.
Solutions to environmental problems involve changing human behaviors which have been identified as potentially causal. Additional units could include outreach activities such as summarizing activities where the process and conclusions are communicated to the community by poster presentation, fliers, public service announcements or videos. Another could contain a web-based career exploratory whereby students are asked to identify a target position for employment then plan out a route including identification of skills required, identification of skills training providers, target entry level positions and career advancement scheme in environmental based organizations.