Visualizing Earth Project

NSF-funded Cognitive Research Project

Visualizing Earth is an educational research project funded by the National Science Foundation. The Visualizing Earth team explored the power and implications of geographic visualizations in Earth science education, with a special focuses on cognitive issues associated with student use of images and visualizations. Through a combination of classroom experiences, laboratory experiments and structured interviews, we explored the cognitive underpinnings and implications of student use of geographic visualizations. Based on this research, we developed recommendations for teachers, curriculum developers and technology developers to enable more effective use of these tools and resources in Earth science education.

TERC's Center for Earth and Space Science Education
TERC is a non-profit educational research and development center, specializing in inquiry-based approaches to science, math and technology education. Within TERC, Visualizing Earth is part of the Center for Earth and Space Science Education.

Pennsylvania State University
PSU is one of the ten largest universities in the United States, enrolling over 80,000 students system wide. The main campus is at University Park, PA which houses twelve academic Colleges, and is the primary site for graduate study leading to the Ph.D. or master's degrees in 150 fields. Additional facilities (including the Medical School) are found at 24 other campuses throughout the Commonwealth. Penn State is dedicated to creating an institution in which the teaching, research, and outreach missions are highly integrated. Particularly relevant to Visualizing Earth are the College of the Liberal Arts and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences which include the Department of Psychology and the Department of Geography, respectively.

San Diego State University
SDSU is one of 23 campuses of the California State University System (CSC). With more than 350,000 students, CSU is the largest education institution in the U.S. SDSU, over 100 years old, and the largest of the regional campuses with more than 31,000 students on the main campus and the satellite campus in Imperial Valley. The University is focused on delivering a quality education to students interested in professional careers and encourage life-long learning. Significant components of the curriculum focus on global interaction and collaboration with the Pacific Rim and Latin American countries. Since it is close to the Mexican border, the University is developing long-term partnerships with Mexico and other Latin American countries using Internet-2 and other means of connectivity. High-end visualization and communication are important instructional components utilized by University faculty as it seeks to better serve the State of California and our international partners.

University of Califonia San Diego
UCSD, one of the newest of the nine campuses that make up the University of California system, recently marked its thirty-fifth anniversary. As a member of the nine-campus family of the University of California, UCSD offers a wide range of graduate and undergraduate programs leading to the bachelor's, master's, M.D., and Ph.D. degrees. UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography is internationally renowned, and UCSD's School of Medicine has won national acclaim for excellence. UCSD's Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, approved by the Regents in 1986, is the only school of international affairs in the UC system. At the undergraduate and graduate levels, UCSD's curricula and programs have been highly ranked in recent surveys of American higher education.

Daniel Barstow is Director of the Center for Earth and Space Science Education at TERC. His primary areas of interest are the use of images and visualizations in education, inquiry-based learning, curriculum design and teacher professional development. He is a Principal Investigator on several major educational projects, including EarthKAM, Exploring Mars, Astrobiology Education, GLOBE, NASA Student Involvement Program. Prior to his work at TERC, he was a teacher and administrator in the Hartford school system for 14 years, Assistant Director of the Talcott Mountain Science Center and President of Metacomet Software.

Eric Frost a Professor of Giological Science is Director of the Central Asia Research and Remediation Exchange (CARRE) and the Computer Imaging, Visualization, and Animation Center (CIVAC) at SDSU. He is also a Faculty Fellow with the NPACI Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering and works with NASA on numerous projects. His primary areas of interest are using computer visualization and communication tools to link workers on a global scale for doing earth systems science, seismic safety, resource exploration, and telemedicine. His work on visualization focuses on the use of Earth visualizations in three or more dimensions, generally using large data sets like satellite imagery and seismic cubes of the interior of the Earth. His research and applications development are centered around the creation of Group Immersive Visualization systems to allow students and scientists to collaboratively experience earth interactions and better appreciate the incredible character of the world on which we live.

Lynn Liben is the Director of the Child Study Center and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Pennsylvania State University. She is a developmental psychologist whose work has been focused largely on the development of spatial concepts in children, and on how knowledge of these developmental changes may inform education. She has also conducted research on the factors hypothesized to contribute to the common finding that as a group, boys and men perform better than girls and women on spatial tasks. She has authored numerous publications, has served as president of the Division of Developmental Psychology of the APA, and is currently the editor of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Her applied work has included consulting with Children's Television Workshop on geography programming for SESAME STREET, working with the National Geographic Society on their National Geography Bee, collaborating with geographers in developing classroom activities to foster geographic education, and working with museums in preparing image-based exhibits such as those related to earth science.

Sally Ride, former NASA Astronaut, is a physicist and a member of the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, as a physics professor. She is a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. She is also the former Director of the California Space Institute, a research institute at the University of California. She has written several children's books, one, To Space and Back, describing her experiences in space. She has received the Jefferson Award for Public Service and twice been awarded the National Spaceflight Medal. She is also the Principal Investigator on another major educational project, EarthKAM. EarthKAM is a NASA-sponsored program that enables middle school students to take photographs of the Earth from a camera aboard the Space Shuttle.