Mark McCaffrey - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Mark McCaffrey
The Science Teacher, 2014
As an international collaborative effort involving scientific organizations and scientists from o... more As an international collaborative effort involving scientific organizations and scientists from over 60 nations to study the polar regions and their global linkages during an intensive observation period running from 2007 to 2009, the International Polar Year (IPY) is recognized as a unique and timely opportunity to communicate to broad audiences the dynamics of polar regions and their global connections. The overall international effort to develop specific education, outreach and communication (EOC) strategies and foster a broad community supporting IPY activities has benefitted from the planning of the U.S. Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, and from workshops funded and organized by the U.S. National Science Foundation, NOAA, Columbia University and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). This paper will examine the history of these efforts, the challenges the community has faced in pursuing the opportunities, and the suc...
… Assembly 2010, held …, 2010
The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences (http://www. climatescience. gov/Library/Literacy/) ... more The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences (http://www. climatescience. gov/Library/Literacy/) provides a coherent framework for climate education, but educators need professional development and standards-aligned curriculum to implement it. Climate ...
The Science Teacher, 2014
Articles in last summer's issue of The Science Teacher (introduced by Metz 2013), and other a... more Articles in last summer's issue of The Science Teacher (introduced by Metz 2013), and other articles like them, tout the benefits of using scientific argumentation in teaching scientific inquiry. As science education professor Jonathan Osborne says: "Argumentation is the means that scientists use to make their case for new ideas" (2010a). Indeed, understanding scientific practice is, in part, understanding scientific argumentation. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) recognize "engaging in argument from evidence" as one of eight essential scientific and engineering practices. But be cautious in introducing students to scientific argumentation, especially in choosing a topic. It's tempting to choose controversial topics to teach the skill of arguing from evidence. Controversies, after all, are what people argue about. But controversial topics also pose a risk: Choosing the wrong controversial topic can result in a net loss, rather...
Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 2015
Environmental Research Letters, 2020
By some counts, up to 98% of environmental news stories are negative in nature. Implicit in this ... more By some counts, up to 98% of environmental news stories are negative in nature. Implicit in this number is the conventional wisdom among many communicators that increasing people’s understanding, awareness, concern or even fear of climate change are necessary precursors for action and behavior change. In this article we review scientific theories of mind and brain that explain why this conventional view is flawed. In real life, the relationship between beliefs and behavior often goes in the opposite direction: our actions change our beliefs, awareness and concerns through a process of self-justification and self-persuasion. As one action leads to another, this process of self-persuasion can go hand in hand with a deepening engagement and the development of agency—knowinghowto act. One important source of agency is learning from the actions of others. We therefore propose an approach to climate communication and storytelling that builds people’s agency for climate action by providing...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020
Significance Achieving a rapid global decarbonization to stabilize the climate critically depends... more Significance Achieving a rapid global decarbonization to stabilize the climate critically depends on activating contagious and fast-spreading processes of social and technological change within the next few years. Drawing on expert elicitation, an expert workshop, and a review of literature, which provides a comprehensive analysis on this topic, we propose concrete interventions to induce positive social tipping dynamics and a rapid global transformation to carbon-neutral societies. These social tipping interventions comprise removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation, building carbon-neutral cities, divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels, strengthening climate education and engagement, and disclosing greenhouse gas emissions information.
Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and related sustainability initiatives will require ha... more Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and related sustainability initiatives will require halving of greenhouse gas emissions each decade from now on through to 2050, when net zero emissions should be achieved. To reach such significant reductions requires a rapid and strategic scaling of existing and emerging technologies and practices, coupled with economic and social transformation and novel governance solutions. A new “Powers of 10” (P10) logarithmic optimization framework offers a social perspective and practical tool for climate action by complementing technology, business, finance and policy paradigms and existing governance frameworks. P10 identifies optimal population cohorts for climate action between a single individual and the globally projected ~10 billion persons by 2050. Applying a robust dataset of climate solutions from Project Drawdown’s Plausible scenario, we find prioritizing community to urban-focused climate action can help maximize top-down and bottom-up ...
Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 2005
Validating the scientific quality and potential of digital resources use in classroom settings ha... more Validating the scientific quality and potential of digital resources use in classroom settings has become a major focus of recent digital library efforts such as the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). The Climate Change Collection is thematic collection of digital resources relating to the topic of global climate change and natural climate variability designed as a pilot project for reviewing the scientific quality and pedagogical potential of selected digital resources using a focused and streamlined approach. The collection offers a case-study in integrating research and education through the collaborative efforts of an interdisciplinary review team made up of professionals from the fields of climate research, geoscience education, cognitive psychology, and evaluation. Each participant received a stipend for their involvement in the process. Designed as an experiment in streamlined collection development, it is anticipated that the experience of the Climate Change Collection effort will help inform future digital library review and collection-building efforts.
Background/Question/Methods Global change, from modern day habitat fragmentation and climate chan... more Background/Question/Methods Global change, from modern day habitat fragmentation and climate change to ancient extinctions and land formation, are some of the most compelling and challenging ideas for educators to teach. Yet, aside from state standards and regional curricular materials, it is not well-known how often and to what extent educators cover these topics. Moreover, it is not well-known how their own understanding limits or enhances their ability to share these often complex ideas. In order to address this challenge, the National Center for Science Education, the UC Museum of Paleontology, and BSCS surveyed educators across the country to find out what educators were teaching about global change, why they were choosing certain topics to focus on and how scientists can best serve this community. Results/Conclusions The over 1350 respondents to the survey represented educators in grades 6-16 and informal settings in every state across the country and covering all areas of the...
Nature Climate Change, 2012
Journal of Geoscience Education, 2014
In recent years, various climate change education efforts have been launched, including federally... more In recent years, various climate change education efforts have been launched, including federally (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, etc.) and privately funded projects. In addition, climate literacy and energy literacy frameworks have been developed and deployed, and both have been reviewed and endorsed by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This paper describes a communitybased effort to promote climate and energy literacy: the CLEAN Network (originally the Climate Literacy Network). We describe results from a member survey about the importance of the network to the members' professional lives and review the development and position of the network within the larger community of climate and energy literacy stakeholders. The CLEAN Network was first formed in 2008 to support climate literacy efforts, largely through voluntary efforts. It serves as a champion and rudimentary and unfunded backbone support organization, enabling first steps toward establishing the elements necessary for successful collective impact in achieving climate literacy. Among the elements that have been described to be essential for a collective impact, the CLEAN Network most effectively provides continuous communication for the broad community of climate literacy stakeholders. The network enables its professionally diverse members to learn of one another's needs and to begin identifying mutually reinforcing activities that will address the common agenda and shared system of measures (two other key elements of collective impact) once they are established. The CLEAN Network serves as a small champion group that continues to seek input from the larger climate literacy stakeholder community on how a backbone support organization might support and extend their efforts. The next steps in a collective impact approach to climate and energy literacy include defining and forming a backbone support organization to facilitate the development of a shared agenda and a shared system of measures, which has the support of all stakeholders, that is sufficiently funded and can help mobilize funding to scale what works in climate and energy literacy. Such an organization would have collective impact that is commensurate to the challenges and opportunities climate change present to the nation.
Journal of Geoscience Education, 2012
Educators seek to develop 21st century skills in the classroom by incorporating educational mater... more Educators seek to develop 21st century skills in the classroom by incorporating educational materials other than textbooks into their lessons, such as digitally available activities, videos, and visualizations. A problem that educators face is that no review process similar to the formal adoption processes used for K-12 textbooks or the college-textbook review process exists for these types of online educational resources. However, educators need authoritative high-quality digital teaching materials. The scientific journal peer-review system offers a well-established model to adapt to the requirements of a peer review of educational materials. In this paper, we review ten review processes developed to evaluate digital geoscience educational resources and focus in detail on a rigorous iterative peer-review process recently developed by the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) project. This process builds upon existing efforts and emphasizes the ''curation'' of a digital collection that addresses the Essential Principles of Climate Literacy and the Energy Literacy Principles. Providing educators with thoroughly reviewed educational materials is especially important for fast changing, societally important, and sensitive areas such as climate and energy science.
The Science Teacher, 2014
As an international collaborative effort involving scientific organizations and scientists from o... more As an international collaborative effort involving scientific organizations and scientists from over 60 nations to study the polar regions and their global linkages during an intensive observation period running from 2007 to 2009, the International Polar Year (IPY) is recognized as a unique and timely opportunity to communicate to broad audiences the dynamics of polar regions and their global connections. The overall international effort to develop specific education, outreach and communication (EOC) strategies and foster a broad community supporting IPY activities has benefitted from the planning of the U.S. Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, and from workshops funded and organized by the U.S. National Science Foundation, NOAA, Columbia University and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). This paper will examine the history of these efforts, the challenges the community has faced in pursuing the opportunities, and the suc...
… Assembly 2010, held …, 2010
The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences (http://www. climatescience. gov/Library/Literacy/) ... more The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences (http://www. climatescience. gov/Library/Literacy/) provides a coherent framework for climate education, but educators need professional development and standards-aligned curriculum to implement it. Climate ...
The Science Teacher, 2014
Articles in last summer's issue of The Science Teacher (introduced by Metz 2013), and other a... more Articles in last summer's issue of The Science Teacher (introduced by Metz 2013), and other articles like them, tout the benefits of using scientific argumentation in teaching scientific inquiry. As science education professor Jonathan Osborne says: "Argumentation is the means that scientists use to make their case for new ideas" (2010a). Indeed, understanding scientific practice is, in part, understanding scientific argumentation. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) recognize "engaging in argument from evidence" as one of eight essential scientific and engineering practices. But be cautious in introducing students to scientific argumentation, especially in choosing a topic. It's tempting to choose controversial topics to teach the skill of arguing from evidence. Controversies, after all, are what people argue about. But controversial topics also pose a risk: Choosing the wrong controversial topic can result in a net loss, rather...
Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 2015
Environmental Research Letters, 2020
By some counts, up to 98% of environmental news stories are negative in nature. Implicit in this ... more By some counts, up to 98% of environmental news stories are negative in nature. Implicit in this number is the conventional wisdom among many communicators that increasing people’s understanding, awareness, concern or even fear of climate change are necessary precursors for action and behavior change. In this article we review scientific theories of mind and brain that explain why this conventional view is flawed. In real life, the relationship between beliefs and behavior often goes in the opposite direction: our actions change our beliefs, awareness and concerns through a process of self-justification and self-persuasion. As one action leads to another, this process of self-persuasion can go hand in hand with a deepening engagement and the development of agency—knowinghowto act. One important source of agency is learning from the actions of others. We therefore propose an approach to climate communication and storytelling that builds people’s agency for climate action by providing...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020
Significance Achieving a rapid global decarbonization to stabilize the climate critically depends... more Significance Achieving a rapid global decarbonization to stabilize the climate critically depends on activating contagious and fast-spreading processes of social and technological change within the next few years. Drawing on expert elicitation, an expert workshop, and a review of literature, which provides a comprehensive analysis on this topic, we propose concrete interventions to induce positive social tipping dynamics and a rapid global transformation to carbon-neutral societies. These social tipping interventions comprise removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation, building carbon-neutral cities, divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels, strengthening climate education and engagement, and disclosing greenhouse gas emissions information.
Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and related sustainability initiatives will require ha... more Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and related sustainability initiatives will require halving of greenhouse gas emissions each decade from now on through to 2050, when net zero emissions should be achieved. To reach such significant reductions requires a rapid and strategic scaling of existing and emerging technologies and practices, coupled with economic and social transformation and novel governance solutions. A new “Powers of 10” (P10) logarithmic optimization framework offers a social perspective and practical tool for climate action by complementing technology, business, finance and policy paradigms and existing governance frameworks. P10 identifies optimal population cohorts for climate action between a single individual and the globally projected ~10 billion persons by 2050. Applying a robust dataset of climate solutions from Project Drawdown’s Plausible scenario, we find prioritizing community to urban-focused climate action can help maximize top-down and bottom-up ...
Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 2005
Validating the scientific quality and potential of digital resources use in classroom settings ha... more Validating the scientific quality and potential of digital resources use in classroom settings has become a major focus of recent digital library efforts such as the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). The Climate Change Collection is thematic collection of digital resources relating to the topic of global climate change and natural climate variability designed as a pilot project for reviewing the scientific quality and pedagogical potential of selected digital resources using a focused and streamlined approach. The collection offers a case-study in integrating research and education through the collaborative efforts of an interdisciplinary review team made up of professionals from the fields of climate research, geoscience education, cognitive psychology, and evaluation. Each participant received a stipend for their involvement in the process. Designed as an experiment in streamlined collection development, it is anticipated that the experience of the Climate Change Collection effort will help inform future digital library review and collection-building efforts.
Background/Question/Methods Global change, from modern day habitat fragmentation and climate chan... more Background/Question/Methods Global change, from modern day habitat fragmentation and climate change to ancient extinctions and land formation, are some of the most compelling and challenging ideas for educators to teach. Yet, aside from state standards and regional curricular materials, it is not well-known how often and to what extent educators cover these topics. Moreover, it is not well-known how their own understanding limits or enhances their ability to share these often complex ideas. In order to address this challenge, the National Center for Science Education, the UC Museum of Paleontology, and BSCS surveyed educators across the country to find out what educators were teaching about global change, why they were choosing certain topics to focus on and how scientists can best serve this community. Results/Conclusions The over 1350 respondents to the survey represented educators in grades 6-16 and informal settings in every state across the country and covering all areas of the...
Nature Climate Change, 2012
Journal of Geoscience Education, 2014
In recent years, various climate change education efforts have been launched, including federally... more In recent years, various climate change education efforts have been launched, including federally (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, etc.) and privately funded projects. In addition, climate literacy and energy literacy frameworks have been developed and deployed, and both have been reviewed and endorsed by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This paper describes a communitybased effort to promote climate and energy literacy: the CLEAN Network (originally the Climate Literacy Network). We describe results from a member survey about the importance of the network to the members' professional lives and review the development and position of the network within the larger community of climate and energy literacy stakeholders. The CLEAN Network was first formed in 2008 to support climate literacy efforts, largely through voluntary efforts. It serves as a champion and rudimentary and unfunded backbone support organization, enabling first steps toward establishing the elements necessary for successful collective impact in achieving climate literacy. Among the elements that have been described to be essential for a collective impact, the CLEAN Network most effectively provides continuous communication for the broad community of climate literacy stakeholders. The network enables its professionally diverse members to learn of one another's needs and to begin identifying mutually reinforcing activities that will address the common agenda and shared system of measures (two other key elements of collective impact) once they are established. The CLEAN Network serves as a small champion group that continues to seek input from the larger climate literacy stakeholder community on how a backbone support organization might support and extend their efforts. The next steps in a collective impact approach to climate and energy literacy include defining and forming a backbone support organization to facilitate the development of a shared agenda and a shared system of measures, which has the support of all stakeholders, that is sufficiently funded and can help mobilize funding to scale what works in climate and energy literacy. Such an organization would have collective impact that is commensurate to the challenges and opportunities climate change present to the nation.
Journal of Geoscience Education, 2012
Educators seek to develop 21st century skills in the classroom by incorporating educational mater... more Educators seek to develop 21st century skills in the classroom by incorporating educational materials other than textbooks into their lessons, such as digitally available activities, videos, and visualizations. A problem that educators face is that no review process similar to the formal adoption processes used for K-12 textbooks or the college-textbook review process exists for these types of online educational resources. However, educators need authoritative high-quality digital teaching materials. The scientific journal peer-review system offers a well-established model to adapt to the requirements of a peer review of educational materials. In this paper, we review ten review processes developed to evaluate digital geoscience educational resources and focus in detail on a rigorous iterative peer-review process recently developed by the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) project. This process builds upon existing efforts and emphasizes the ''curation'' of a digital collection that addresses the Essential Principles of Climate Literacy and the Energy Literacy Principles. Providing educators with thoroughly reviewed educational materials is especially important for fast changing, societally important, and sensitive areas such as climate and energy science.