This blueprint outlines a blueprint for a program of research and development for a K-12 curriculum focusing on environmental science literacy—the capacity to understand and participate in evidence-based discussions of the effects of human actions on environmental systems.  Environmental science literate high school graduates should be able to engage in two practices that are essential for environmentally responsible citizenship.  They should be able to understand and evaluate experts’ arguments about environmental issues, and they should be able to decide on policies and personal actions that are consistent with their environmental values.

Environmental science literacy requires understanding of many aspects of science, including those addressed in this session: Chemical and physical change, carbon cycling, diversity and evolution by natural selection, and connecting human actions with environmental systems.  These phenomena are currently addressed in many state and national standards documents and in school curricula, but typically they are addressed in disconnected ways—in different courses or in different units in the same course.  We argue that they can fit together as a coherent conceptual domain that all of our citizens need to understand.  In particular, understanding in all of these domains requires applying fundamental principles to processes in coupled human and natural systems.

Our framework includes three components:

• Practices.  Environmental science literacy includes three key practices:

• Inquiry: learning from experience, developing and evaluating arguments from evidence

• Scientific accounts: understanding and producing model-based accounts of environmental systems; using scientific accounts to explain and predict observations

• Citizenship: using scientific reasoning for responsible citizenship

• Principles applied to processes in systems.  Each practice involves applying fundamental principles to processes in coupled human and natural systems. 

• Principles.  Key categories of principles include:

• Inquiry principles, including principles for acquiring data, finding patterns in data, and critiquing and evaluating investigations

• Structure of systems, including atomic-molecular, microscopic, macroscopic, and large-scale structures

• Constraints on processes, including principles for tracing matter, energy, and information through processes in systems.

• Change over time, including principles for understanding multiple causation, feedback loops, and evolutionary changes in populations

• Citizenship principles, including principles for evaluating conflicting claims and deciding on responsible courses of action.

• Processes in systems.  Key systems and processes include:

• Earth systems, including the earth, atmosphere, and water.

• Living systems, including cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems.

• Engineered systems, including the systems that provide human populations with food, energy, water, and transportation.

• Learning progressions.  We seek to develop research-based learning progressions that describe how K-12 students could come to master the practices of environmental literacy.  Learning progressions are built around (a) an upper anchor: the detailed practices that we hope high school graduates will master, (b) a lower anchor: what we learn from empirical research about the practices and understandings of children in elementary school, and (c) progress variables that can be used to describe a series of reasonable steps from the lower to the upper anchor.  We organize these learning progressions around three strands:

• Carbon.  The role of carbon compounds in earth, living, and engineered systems, including carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, energy flow and carbon cycling in ecosystems, and fossil fuels in human energy and transportation systems

• Water.  The role of water and substances carried by water in earth, living, and engineered systems, including the atmosphere, surface water and ice, ground water, human water systems, and water in living systems.

• Diversity.  The diversity of living and engineered systems, including genetics and life cycles of individual organisms, evolutionary changes in populations, diversity in natural ecosystems and in human systems that produce food, fiber, and wood.

Working groups consisting of university-based researchers and K-12 teachers are focusing on each strand, reviewing relevant literature, developing assessments that reveal students’ reasoning about the topic, and administering the assessments in the teachers’ classrooms.  Our goal is to produce three kinds of products:

• Learning progressions as described above: research-based accounts of how students enter school thinking about environmental systems, and of the progress variables and learning processes that could lead to the development of environmentally literate practices and understandings.

• Assessment resources that can be used for research and to guide teachers’ practice as they assess students’ progress toward environmental literacy.

• Teaching resources that teachers can use to help students master the practices and understandings of environmental science literacy in ways appropriate for the students’ ages and cultures.