USING MULTIPLE REAL-WORLD DATASETS TO BUILD DATA LITERACY AMONG UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE INTRODUCTION TO OCEANOGRAPHY LABS

Introductory Oceanography textbooks illustrate and explain oceanographic processes by focusing on the “ideal” situations; students need to learn what is “normal” before they can understand how real-world processes deviate from “normal” and why.  Real-time ocean data includes numbers, units of measurement, and various visualization techniques ranging from graphs with x and y axes to maps.  Data can be scary, particularly for students who consider themselves “not good at math” – “math” being a catch-all for anything involving numbers.  An online oceanography lab provides the perfect opportunity for students to build the skills necessary to improve their data literacy and become more comfortable with “math”.  Several real-world datasets are used in my oceanography lab course (e.g., the Ocean Observatories Initiative, earth.nullschool.net, Google Earth) to show students how and where processes “match” their textbook diagrams, and how and where they differ.  Students are guided through a scaffolded process to increase familiarity with different data visualization techniques including station profiles, vertical sections, bathymetric maps, and animated data maps, and then answer questions and create their own graphs and charts to demonstrate their understanding.  At the end of each module, students reflect on what they learned and where they struggled in the lab exercises – often these reflections illustrate a conversion from “math averse” to “math curious” over the course of the semester!

Presentation Preference: Oral

Primary Presenter: Margaret Blome, East Carolina University (blomem19@ecu.edu)

Authors:

Margaret Blome, East Carolina University  (blomem19@ecu.edu)