The American Meteorological Society\u27s (AMS) Educational Program seeks to assist the improvement of science education in K-12 classrooms through implementation of the National Science Education Standards. This goal is being accomplished through the offering of three teacher enhancement courses via blended instruction methods. Following course participation each teacher functions as an Earth system science education resource person for his/her colleagues

Blair, Bernard A.

Geer, Ira W.

Hopkins, Edward J.

Mills, Elizabeth W.

Moran, Joseph M.

Weinbeck, Robert S.

English

The College at Brockport, State University of New York: Digital Commons @Brockport

The College at Brockport: State University of New York
Digital Commons @Brockport
Earth Sciences Faculty Publications Department of the Earth Sciences
1-11-2004
Datastreme Courses: Teacher Enhancement
Utilizing Current Environmental Data and the
Internet
Ira W. Geer
American Meteorological Society
Joseph M. Moran
American Meteorological Society
Elizabeth W. Mills
American Meteorological Society
Robert S. Weinbeck
The College at Brockport, weinbeck@dc.ametsoc.org
Edward J. Hopkins
University of Wisconsin - Madison
See next page for additional authors
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/esc_facpub
Part of the Earth Sciences Commons
Citation/Publisher Attribution:
Geer, I. W., Moran, J. M., Mills, E. W., Weinbeck, R. S., Hopkins, E. J., and Blair, B. A. , 2004, Datastreme Courses: Teacher
Enhancement Utilizing Current Environmental Data and the Internet, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soci., 5691-5694. Available on publisher's
site at http://www.ametsoc.org/pubs/bams/.
This Conference Proceeding is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of the Earth Sciences at Digital Commons @Brockport. It
has been accepted for inclusion in Earth Sciences Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @Brockport. For more
information, please contact kmyers@brockport.edu.
Repository Citation
Geer, Ira W.; Moran, Joseph M.; Mills, Elizabeth W.; Weinbeck, Robert S.; Hopkins, Edward J.; and Blair, Bernard A., "Datastreme
Courses: Teacher Enhancement Utilizing Current Environmental Data and the Internet" (2004). Earth Sciences Faculty Publications. 2.
https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/esc_facpub/2
Authors
Ira W. Geer, Joseph M. Moran, Elizabeth W. Mills, Robert S. Weinbeck, Edward J. Hopkins, and Bernard A.
Blair
This conference proceeding is available at Digital Commons @Brockport: https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/esc_facpub/2
P1.16 DATASTREME COURSES: TEACHER ENHANCEMENT UTILIZING CURRENT ENVIRONMENTAL DATA 
AND THE INTERNET 
 
Ira W. Geer 
American Meteorological Society 
Washington, DC 
 
Joseph M. Moran 
American Meteorological Society 
Washington, DC 
 
Elizabeth W. Mills 
American Meteorological Society 
Washington, DC 
 
Robert S. Weinbeck* 
SUNY Brockport 
Brockport, NY 
 
Edward J. Hopkins 
University of Wisconsin - Madison 
Madison, WI 
 
Bernard A. Blair 
American Meteorological Society 
Washington, DC 
 
1. INTRODUCTION 
 
The American Meteorological Society's (AMS) 
Educational Program seeks to assist the improvement 
of science education in K-12 classrooms through 
implementation of the National Science Education 
Standards.  This goal is being accomplished through the 
offering of three teacher enhancement courses via 
blended instruction methods.  Following course 
participation each teacher functions as an Earth system 
science education resource person for his/her 
colleagues. 
 
2. DATASTREME PROJECT 
 
In 1995 the National Science Foundation provided 
funding for The DataStreme Project, a national teacher 
enhancement course on the basics of weather and 
climate created by the AMS Education Program.  The 
DataStreme course was offered through Local 
Implementation Teams (LITs) led by master precollege 
teachers along with professional meteorologists and 
college science educators.  Partially delivered via the 
Internet, the DataStreme course proved to be a highly 
motivational and effective introduction to meteorology 
for K-12 teachers across the nation.  Custom designed 
course learning materials include a carefully tailored 
textbook and study guide.  The study guide contained 
the first part of 24 investigations to be finished with 
activities written by AMS Education Program staff to 
near-realtime data and delivered twice weekly via the 
course homepage.  Also delivered via the course 
homepage were daily national weather summaries and 
supplemental information files in addition to custom 
designed meteorological data products that are updated 
as frequently as hourly.  The course covers twelve 
weeks with a chapter of the text setting the principal 
theme for each week's work.  LITs meet at the 
beginning, middle and end of the semester with all 
participants, while assigned team mentors maintain 
weekly contact with each participant.  Teachers  
------------------------------------------------------------------------  
* Corresponding author address: Robert S. Weinbeck, 
American Meteorological Society, 1120 G St., N.W., 
Suite 800, Washington, DC 20005; e-mail: 
weinbeck@dc.ametsoc.org. 
completing the course earn three hours of graduate 
credit from the State University of New York College at 
Brockport. 
 
3. THE DATASTREME MODEL 
 
The effectiveness and success of the DataStreme 
course was initially evaluated by surveys completed by 
the participants near the end of the semester in which 
they were enrolled.  After an initial offering, surveys of 
pedagogical attitude and content acquisition were 
included at the beginning and end of each term.  
Evaluations were also given to LIT leaders and 
members.  After several semesters, a survey was given 
to participants who had taken the course at least one 
semester previously to assess long-term satisfaction.  
The high level of satisfaction for the course and its 
delivery system led to the formalization of the empirical 
DataStreme Model of teacher enhancement. 
The DataStreme weather course, presently termed 
DataStreme Atmosphere, has been offered each 
semester since 1995 and has been joined by two 
additional DataStreme distance-learning, teacher 
enhancement courses utilizing environmental 
investigations based on near-realtime 
telecommunicated data to provide authentic science 
experiences in an exciting and motivating setting.  The 
blend of several course meetings with personalized 
weekly mentoring complements the asynchronous 
course materials.  This blend of learning methods has 
proven to be very popular and successful. 
 
4. DATASTREME ATMOSPHERE 
 
Evaluations completed by course participants at the 
end of the term have rated the course as "good" by 
95%, the most positive of the three options.  They have 
rated science content as 98% and materials and 
Internet course delivery approach as 92%.  Peer 
impacts regarding weather content in their teaching 
even while taking the course averaged 3.8 for a total of 
17,800 teachers while the total number of students 
impacted was almost 700,000. 
Pedagogical attitude was assessed by surveys 
given at the beginning and end of the course, using a 5-
category scale from "minimal" to "exemplary" in four 
areas.  They were the ability to use of weather to meet 
student needs, to teach science, to manage learning 
with Internet-delivered data, and to assist colleagues.  
The course increased the average of individuals' 
perceived category responses by 1.5 levels, from 
"rudimentary" to "adequate"/"superior". 
General mastery of course topics was also 
assessed by the number of correct responses to eleven 
science-content questions.  The percentage of correct 
answers increased by an average of 19%, from 55% to 
74%.  Both the attitude and content increases were 
statistically significant at 95% levels (Weinbeck et al. 
2002). 
As shown in Figure 1 (following page), through the 
Spring 2003 term, 6238 teachers have been trained in 
the DataStreme Atmosphere course.  Following the 
course they become weather education resource 
teachers in their school districts for their peers.  Results 
of a follow-up survey given to alumni at least one-
semester after their enrollment indicated that each 
teacher had approximately 20 interactions with 
colleagues and impacted 225 students.  Employing 
these averages along with numbers of participants 
completing the course each year (allowing some attrition 
of effort with time), we estimate that approximately 
225,000 teachers and over 6 million students have 
benefited from the teachers completing the DataStreme 
Atmosphere course.  For more information, see: 
http://www.ametsoc.org/dstreme/index.html. 
 
5. DATASTREME WATER IN THE EARTH SYSTEM 
 
The success of DataStreme Atmosphere inspired 
the development of another teacher enhancement 
course, Water in the Earth System (WES) with NSF 
support.  DataStreme WES focuses on the global water 
cycle as a vehicle to explore Earth system science.  
First offered in Spring 2001, WES utilizes the delivery 
model of DataStreme Atmosphere (i.e., Local 
Implementation Teams, text and study guide, Internet 
delivery, several meetings with weekly mentoring).  The 
DataStreme WES course homepage delivers a Weekly 
Water News file that is continually updated with water-
related items from around the world, a supplemental 
water information file, the second half of twice-weekly 
learning investigations (delivered each Tuesday and 
Thursday during the term), and many site links to water 
topics and environmental information regarding water. 
DataStreme WES semester evaluations and 
beginning/ending surveys follow the same format as 
DataStreme Atmosphere.  Results show the same high 
participant satisfaction with the most positive response 
being 97% for the course overall, 98% for science 
content, and 95% for materials and 94% Internet 
delivery.  DataStreme WES participants' confidence in 
the pedagogical utility of using water topics for 
classroom instruction increased by 1.4 categories (same 
scale as DataStreme Atmosphere noted above).  They 
also improved their content knowledge by 14%, also 
95% statistically significant values (Geer et al. 2003). 
Figure 2 shows that through the Spring 2003 
semester, the WES course had trained 1101 teachers.  
Course alumni are also acting as peer trainers on 
environmental data usage and water cycle 
understandings for their colleagues.  By the same 
reasoning as that for DataStreme Atmosphere, 
DataStreme WES participants can have been expected 
to have impacted over 28,000 teachers and nearly 
400,000 students.  The DataStreme WES course has 
received additional support from the National 
Aeronautics and Space Administration.  For more 
information, see: 
http://www.ametsoc.org/amsedu/WES/index.html. 
 
6. DATASTREME OCEAN 
 
Based on the success of DataStreme Atmosphere 
and DataStreme WES, and with support from the 
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric 
Administration (NOAA), the AMS proceeded to develop 
and pilot test DataStreme Ocean.  DataStreme Ocean is 
a teacher enhancement course on oceanography.  
During the Fall 2003 semester, 22 LIT members went 
through the course materials in a semester schedule 
arrangement (Geer et al. 2004).  Results from that pilot 
are reported elsewhere in these Symposium preprints.  
For more information, see: 
http://www.ametsoc.org/amsedu/DS-Ocean/Join.html. 
 
7. AMS/NOAA CPESE 
 
NOAA's long-term and strong support of AMS 
educational activity in the atmospheric and oceanic 
sciences by way of summer teacher workshops, 
together with volunteer employee participation on 
DataStreme Atmosphere, DataStreme WES and 
DataStreme Ocean LITs (more than 200), led to the 
initiation of the Cooperative Program for Earth System 
Education (CPESE) by AMS. 
NOAA is providing support to the AMS Education 
Program to (a) continue DataStreme Atmosphere 
beyond its NSF-funded phase, (b) to develop and 
implement the DataStreme Ocean teacher 
enhancement distance-learning course, and (c) to 
encourage greater minority participation by training 
greater numbers of teachers who are members of 
groups underrepresented in the sciences and/or teach 
in schools with large minority student populations. 
 
8. CONCLUSIONS 
 
The AMS Education Program through its 
DataStreme Atmosphere, DataStreme WES and 
DataStreme Ocean courses is developing thousands of 
resource teachers and peer-trainers who in turn interact 
with hundreds of thousands of their colleagues.  Master 
precollege teachers trained in the AMS Education 
Program have also been active in the implementation of 
the National Science Education Standards at their state 
levels, by writing local state frameworks and 
assessment materials.  They have provided leadership 
that can be documented as impacting the teaching of 
science, mathematics and technology in almost 40 
states. 
DataStreme Atmosphere Precollege 
Participants
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
S96 F96 S97 F97 S98 F98 S99 F99 S00 F00 S01 F01 S02 F02 S03 F03
Semester
T
o
t
a
l
Semester
Project
 
Figure 1.  DataStreme Atmosphere precollege participant completions. 
 
 
DataStreme WES Precollege Participants
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
S01 F01 S02 F02 S03 F03
Semester
T
o
t
a
l
Semester
Project
 
Figure 2.  DataStreme Water in the Earth System (WES) precollege participant completions. 
 
9. REFERENCES 
 
Geer, I.W., J.M. Moran, D.R. Smith, R.S. Weinbeck, E.J. 
Hopkins, and B.A. Blair, 2003: Water in the Earth 
System (WES): A Midterm Evaluation of a Distance 
Learning Course on the Water Cycle. Preprints, 
12th Symp. on Education, Long Beach, CA. 
 
Geer, I.W., J.M. Moran, B.A. Blair, R.S. Weinbeck, D.R. 
Smith, and E.J. Hopkins, 2003: DataStreme Ocean: 
A New Distance-Learning Course for Precollege 
Teachers on the Basics of Oceanography. 
Preprints, 13th Symp. on Education, Seattle, WA, 
this volume. 
 
 
 
Weinbeck, R.S., I.W. Geer, E.J. Hopkins, J.M. Moran, 
and B.A. Blair, 2002: DataStreme: A Distance-
Learning Teacher Enhancement Model that Works. 
Preprints, 11th Symp. on Education, Orlando, FL, 
90-92. 
 
 
 


Datastreme Courses: Teacher Enhancement Utilizing Current Environmental Data and the Internet

https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=esc_facpub

Datastreme Courses: Teacher Enhancement Utilizing Current Environmental Data and the Internet

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

The College at Brockport, State University of New York: Digital Commons @Brockport