Undergraduates’ Preparedness for College-Level Work in STEM: The Importance of Reading and Understanding Scientific Theories, Arguments, and Data

This study focuses on undergraduates’ preparation for college level courses. In recent international PISA results United States students fall behind seventeen countries on the computer-based reading proficiency test. They have scored low for over a decade, in spite of spending more than one hundred-thousand dollars per student on education. This US score is similar to, or lower than, the scores of other countries where spending is lower. Considering reading performance statistics from the international PISA assessment and the inconclusive results from reading comprehension studies across media, the concern arose whether today’s high school students are well prepared for college level courses in STEM. In response to these concerns, we assessed students’ reading comprehension of a difficult scientific article. For that purpose, we investigated students understanding of text material on Earth’s magnetism, across media. The assessment included reading a published article and assessment of comprehension, content knowledge and scientific argument quality. Over a hundred undergraduates in one-hundred-level Earth science classes responded to 29 multiple choice questions, in a regular class setting. Thereafter, reading, and scientific literacy strategies--comprehension, knowledge, content, and sourcing qualities--were evaluated. Overall, participants performed similarly across media; however, several significant variations emerged between demographic groups. For example, females scored better than males on most strategies, and African American students outperformed Latinx students on most strategies. In general, students scored low on total understanding of the article, but higher on content knowledge than comprehension. Only 14 % of participants did well on understanding and argument quality, which coincided with higher familiarity with the topic (12% students) and higher interest (40% students), but the majority, overall, scored low on both familiarity and topic interest. Effective sourcing was correlated with high interest, understanding, and content knowledge. The qualitative findings, from interviews, indicated, conversely, that students felt well prepared for college courses. They reported proficiency in both English reading and writing. Moreover, they reported enjoyment of taking college level courses. This study suggests that it could be beneficial for students’ entering college to become involved in peer reflection activities that would promote their scientific literacy learning, the skills gained when collaborating with others providing the opportunity for both scientific debates and self-reflection. Improvement of scientific literacy skills can increase the readiness of American students for college level work, including students from under-represented groups

Modular System for Shelves and Coasts (MOSSCO v1.0) - a flexible and multi-component framework for coupled coastal ocean ecosystem modelling

Shelf and coastal sea processes extend from the atmosphere through the water column and into the sea bed. These processes are driven by physical, chemical, and biological interactions at local scales, and they are influenced by transport and cross strong spatial gradients. The linkages between domains and many different processes are not adequately described in current model systems. Their limited integration level in part reflects lacking modularity and flexibility; this shortcoming hinders the exchange of data and model components and has historically imposed supremacy of specific physical driver models. We here present the Modular System for Shelves and Coasts (MOSSCO, http://www.mossco.de), a novel domain and process coupling system tailored---but not limited--- to the coupling challenges of and applications in the coastal ocean. MOSSCO builds on the existing coupling technology Earth System Modeling Framework and on the Framework for Aquatic Biogeochemical Models, thereby creating a unique level of modularity in both domain and process coupling; the new framework adds rich metadata, flexible scheduling, configurations that allow several tens of models to be coupled, and tested setups for coastal coupled applications. That way, MOSSCO addresses the technology needs of a growing marine coastal Earth System community that encompasses very different disciplines, numerical tools, and research questions.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Geoscientific Model Development Discussion

Strong solutions of the thin film equation in spherical geometry

We study existence and long-time behaviour of strong solutions for the thin film equation using a priori estimates in a weighted Sobolev space. This equation can be classified as a doubly degenerate fourth-order parabolic and it models coating flow on the outer surface of a sphere. It is shown that the strong solution asymptotically decays to the flat profile