Associate Professor, School of Oceanography, University of Washington

Having grown up in Seattle, I feel a strong commitment to Washington State students and to enhancing their exposure to and understanding of our natural environments and resources. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington for my Bachelors and Masters Degrees, and switched to Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University for my PhD. I was a post-doctoral fellow in Mathematics at the University of British Columbia and the University of Utah. I am currently an Associate Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Washington, where my research interests focus on understanding and predicting marine ecosystems. My wife Martha Groom, who is a Professor of Conservation Biology at UW Bothell, and I have twin boys, Sam and Maks.

As a member of the University of Washington's new College of the Environment, I am very fortunate to be surrounded by colleagues who are deeply committed both to scientific research and to science education. In particular, I am part of an extended community of UW graduate students, post-docs, faculty, and staff dedicated to collaborating with Washington State teachers and education organizations to positively impact students at all levels. The LASER award – really a recognition of the efforts and skills of this entire UW community – highlights our initial efforts but more importantly promotes the future potential for much greater connection and collaboration in science learning and practice between UW and Washington State citizens.

Computational tools, and quantitative reasoning based on those tools, are increasingly central to science, education, and society. As a scientist, educator and citizen I find it puzzling and concerning that while access to computational tools has mushroomed, most students' quantitative thinking skills have not commensurately increased and in some cases have actually decreased. My graduate student, post-doctoral and faculty collaborators at the University of Washington and I recognize that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to address this gap between the potential and the reality of quantitative skills of Washington State students.

Graduate students and post-docs in many University science departments have strong and largely unsatisfied interests in teaching and outreach. Though these energetic graduate-level and post-doctoral scientists have obvious potential for multiplicative impacts on K-12 education, most Universities are poorly set up to foster and exploit this potential. For about the last ten years, my colleagues and I have been developing strategies for enlisting these graduate students and post-docs to advance K-12 education in quantitative skills. Our approach has several broad elements: First, we train graduate students to be effective educators, and promote (rather than suppress) their motivation to engage the public. We financially and academically support their desire to interact directly with and be role models for K-12 students. Second, we identify motivated and skilled K-12 teachers, and run workshops to train them in quantitative thinking and classroom presentation techniques. We support them both during and after these workshops with technical knowledge, teaching materials, and classroom visits. Third, we use computing and other modern methods to introduce sophisticated, well-targeted research-level scientific tools into classrooms, so that students can experience the scientific process first-hand. When possible, we use open source or web-based materials so that students' learning does not stop when their access to classroom machines is over.

Graduate students, post-docs and other practicing researchers are uniquely positioned to address problems that limit students' acquisition of quantitative skills. For example, many students from elementary schools through top graduate schools assess themselves as “no good at math.” This is not only incorrect but frequently self-perpetuating: students who think they cannot do math often focus poorly when trying. Students draw negative inferences about their quantitative abilities largely because they have unrealistic expectations about the time, energy and tactics needed to understand mathematics. Mathematics is logical; students often take failure to quickly comprehend this logic as a reflection on their intellect. As researchers who have worked with leading scientists from around the world, we can authoritatively demonstrate the time, effort and systematic thought processes that even professional mathematicians must expend to understand and interpret mathematics.

Most students have few motivating experiences in which effort invested in mathematics provides them with rewarding insights about the world around them. Without such experiences, it is rational to question why mathematics is worth all the work. Our research expertise enables us to provide students with sophisticated, insightful mathematical models targeted at topic areas they care about, and to challenge students to use these models by asking and answering their own research questions with quantitative arguments. Students who are given this challenge usually rise to it and have a strongly positive experience. Afterwards, they have enhanced quantitative skills, higher assessments of their mathematical abilities, and a stronger sense why mathematical reasoning is powerful and important.

University academic culture has proven very successful at understanding nature, but has been much less effective at disseminating how this understanding is achieved and can best be used. By providing a venue for faculty, post-docs, and graduate students to interact directly with K-12 students, teachers and members of the public, we are contributing to bringing practice and learning of science closer together.