InTeGrate workshop
5/27/15
Learning Goal Worksheet
Climate of Change: Interactions and Feedbacks between Water, Air, and Ice:
Analyze climate data and evaluate how interactions between climate system components lead to
climate variability that impacts human societies.
Unit 1: Teaching Objectives
 Affective: Facilitate discussion of impacts of climate variability and climate change in the Tropics
and polar regions and impacts on past civilizations.
 Cognitive: Promote understanding of the idea that climate change can occur as the result of
some forcing or trigger, or as the result of internal variability, and that feedbacks can enhance or
mitigate climate change.
Unit 2:
 Cognitive: Provide students with an understanding of how ocean-atmosphere interactions lead
to short-term climate variability, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation or the North Atlantic
Oscillation.
 Behavioral: Provide students with experience examining climate data from observations and
formulating hypotheses regarding the cause of change.
Unit 3:
 Cognitive/Propositional: Provide an understanding of ocean-atmosphere interaction, including
the mechanics of ENSO and NAO.
 Behavioral/Practical: Enable the prediction/projection of change in a system, analysis of real
oceanographic data, and application of basic quantitative skills.
 Experiential: Provide opportunities for reflection on the nature of ocean surface oscillations and
on the science that provides the basis for our understanding of these phenomena. Affectively
engage in the impacts of ocean surface oscillations.
Unit 4:
 Cognitive: Provide an understanding of ice loss mechanisms associated with the Greenland ice
sheet, including surface melting and calving of marine-terminating outlet glaciers, the
prominence of these mechanisms during the past decade as expressed in the data, and
implications for future changes in the ice sheet.
 Behavioral: Facilitate skills development in reading and interpreting graphs, calculating rates of
change, and predicting changes in a natural system.
 Affective: Encourage reflection about the multiple components that may contribute to changes
in a natural system and the role of uncertainty in our understanding of complex systems.
Promote the consideration of the potential impacts of cryosphere changes on humans.
Unit 5:
 Cognitive/Propositional: Help students understand climate system function, including the nature
of thresholds, feedbacks, and modeling.
 Behavioral/Practical: Empower students to interpret climate effects, both resulting from specific
forcing mechanisms and recorded in proxy data.
 Experiential: Engage students in the complexities and uncertainties of the climate system and of
climate science.
Unit 6:
 Cognitive: Provide an understanding of current national attitudes about climate change.
Illustrate the difference between climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation
strategies. Provide structured opportunities to identify effective 21st-century climate change
adaptation efforts.
 Behavioral: Facilitate skills development in reading and interpreting maps and graphs.
 Affective: Encourage reflection about one's own beliefs about the existence of climate change,
humans' contribution to climate change, and the potential impacts of climate change on society.
InTeGrate workshop
5/27/15
Learning Goal Worksheet
Provide opportunities for reflection about the inequity of climate change and the need for
climate resilience in industrialized and developing countries.
Natural Hazards and Risks: Hurricanes Module: Students will use data to address the complex
interdisciplinary problems of where, when, and how hurricanes happen, how land and human systems
are affected, how to deal with uncertainty in forecasts, and both societal and personal responses to
hurricane risks.
Specific goals:
Unit 1:
 Define hazard and risk.
 List examples of natural hazards and risks.
 Compare natural hazards and the frequency of their occurrence.
 Calculate personal risk from natural hazards.
Unit 2:
 Explain basic characteristics of tropical storms.
 Apply an uncertainty forecast cone to make recommendations for a ship in the potential
path of a hurricane at sea.
 Unit 3:
 Plot hurricane position using latitude and longitude.
 Describe the path and strength of Hurricane Irene (2011).
 Describe the spatial variability of storm trajectories and speeds based on the historical
record in the Atlantic Ocean.
 Determine the recurrence interval of hurricanes for a particular location.
 Calculate the energy associated with a hurricane season.
 Compare seasonal ACE totals to distinguish above average from below average seasons.
 Elaborate on why predictions of the current hurricane season are useful for society.
Unit 4:
 Identify specific inland hazards that can accompany hurricanes (landslides, flooding, damage
to infrastructure), especially inland.
 Observe and quantify changes by using before and after storm images.
Unit 5:
 Make observations from several sources (newspaper, interview, video, personal account)
about past evacuations.
 Relate the importance of science in making public interest decisions.
 Apply the concept of uncertainty in predictions.
 Compare perspectives of different stakeholders and present those perspectives to the class
in order to make or recommend a decision for a specific scenario.
A Growing Concern: Sustaining Soil Resources through Local Decision Making: Use systems thinking to
make informed decisions that contribute to sustainability of local agricultural systems by analyzing
authentic geospatial and soil data. This module considers land management and climate change threats
to soil resources.
 Use physiographic and land use data to develop a plan for sustainable soil management in one
or more agricultural setting
 Predict agricultural challenges that might result from climate change using systems thinking.
 Use soils and land use history data to develop a plan for sustainable soil management in one or
more agricultural settings.
InTeGrate workshop
5/27/15

Learning Goal Worksheet
Use geological data to develop a plan for sustainable soil management in one or more
agricultural settings.
Interactions between Water, Earth's Surface, and Human Activity: Students use data and build models
to assess how running water erodes and transports rock, shapes landscapes over time, and is capable of
short-term flooding hazards whose effects can be characterized and acted upon
Specific goals:
Unit 1:
 Sketch a diagram of the hydrologic cycle. Explain based on observational evidence, how matter (a
single water molecule) is stored or moved between a storehouse in the geosphere (lithosphere,
atmosphere, hydrosphere) and biosphere
 Explain how the rock cycle interacts with the hydrologic cycle to create sedimentary rock.
Unit 2:
 Synthesize their knowledge and understanding of how fluvial processes shape Earth's surface
by the erosion, transport and deposition of sediment.
 Make connections between Earth systems and the interactions between the hydrologic
cycle, fluvial systems, and the rock cycle.
Unit 3:
 Use direct observations of one or more river systems to determine how a river changes over time
and how humans are affected by those changes.
Unit 4:
 Describe that flooding is periodic and probabilistic, caused by short-term and annual
meteorological factors, and can have profound impacts on humans living along a river system.
Unit 5:
 Model the collaborative process of investigative Earth science.
 Describe how Earth processes are the result of energy flowing and mass cycling within and
between Earth's systems.
Map Your Hazards! – Assessing Hazards, Vulnerability and Risk: Students will recognize and develop
an understanding of how to identify and apply credible data sets to identify local natural hazards,
vulnerable groups and structures, and levels of risk for their community. Additionally, students will
learn how to collect and analyze relevant social data on individual and community knowledge, risk
perception and preparedness within their local social networks. Finally, students will synthesize this
collection of information and produce recommendations to potential stakeholders on how to develop
prepared communities for disasters and make connections in evaluating community interactions with
natural hazards.
Unit 1:
 Students will list and describe the top three to four natural hazards that may exist in their region.
They will also identify vulnerable groups and structures in their area.
o Students will identify and label areas prone to natural hazards on a map that includes
all or a section of their community, including a well-referenced reasoning for why and
how often hazards may occur.
o Students will map areas of social vulnerability including groups (e.g. social class,
gender, race, and age) and structures (e.g. hospitals, schools, and bridges) onto the
same mapping area.
o Students will overlay their hazard and vulnerability maps to determine community
risk, specifically identifying zones that constitute various levels of risk (e.g. high,
InTeGrate workshop
5/27/15
Learning Goal Worksheet
moderate and low risk). Students must justify their designation of risk levels for the
map.
Unit 2:
 Students will distribute a web-based natural hazard and risk survey to their social network (e.g.,
friends and family).
 Students will analyze the resulting data set to determine the level of knowledge, risk perception
and preparedness of their community to natural hazards.
Unit 3:
 Students will identify potential stakeholders (e.g. individuals, social groups, scientists, community
planners, emergency managers, decision makers, etc.) who would have an interest in or benefit
from their assessments of hazards and vulnerabilities. Optional: Invite community stakeholders to
attend and offer feedback or ask them to speak to the class.
 Students will make a general list of recommendations for preparedness, resource allocation and
city planning to promote building a better prepared and more resilient community (these can be
specific to a particular stakeholder group).
 Students (or groups of students) will choose a specific stakeholder to communicate their findings
and recommendations in a hypothetical situation (potential forms can be a speech, written report,
poster or PowerPoint presentation).
InTeGrate workshop
5/27/15
Learning Goal Worksheet
1) What are the overarching learning goals of the module you plan to implement or adapt? Unit
specific learning goals are also listed for each module. Identify any of these that may be
particularly interesting or relevant for your course.
2) How do these learning goals tie-in with other goals or material from your course?
3) Draft a measureable interdisciplinary sustainability learning goal for your course. This may
simply be inserting a learning goal from the module you plan to implement, or this could be an
overarching, course specific goal that will incorporate sustainability (and the module you will
implement). You may also want to consider other goals for the course such as meeting general
education learning goals for your course designation, departmental learning goals, etc..
InTeGrate workshop
5/27/15
Learning Goal Worksheet
4) How will you hold students accountable for meeting this learning goal? What forms of
assessment are appropriate for your course & encourage student engagement? (InTeGrate
assessments, other assessments from your course, etc.)