Explore awards
Use the filter menu and interactive map to explore the past competitions offered and grants awarded through the Environmental Literacy Program.
To learn more about project findings and outcomes, view the summaries of our grantees’ summative evaluation reports.
Resources for Climate Literacy Instruction
Project 2061, the science education reform initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), proposes to identify and translate into classroom materials a range of real-world phenomena (e.g., objects, systems, events) and representations (e.g., models, diagrams, simulations) based largely on data from NOAA's Earth observation systems. These materials will be designed to help increase middle school students' understanding of essential ideas about weather and climate. Our objective is to provide a wide audience of teachers, curriculum developers, teacher education faculty, and professional development providers with online access to a set of high-quality and interrelated activities built around Earth, ocean, and atmospheric phenomena and representations that can supplement or enrich their existing lessons or be integrated into new curriculum materials. This collection of climate literacy materials will be carefully aligned to the learning goals in Climate Literacy: the Essential Principles of Climate Science and in national and state science content standards. By disseminating this online collection widely within the science education community, we also aim to expand the use of NOAA-related scientific data, simulations, animations, and other types of representations in middle school curriculum materials and instruction and to stimulate research on how these materials can be used most effectively.
AMS/NOAA Cooperative Program for Earth System Education (CPESE)
The Cooperative Program for Earth System Education (CPESE) – with assistance from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service and the State University of New York (SUNY) at Brockport – is a major collaboration between the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and NOAA that advances NOAA’s mission of Science, Service, and Stewardship by sharing knowledge and information about weather, climate, and the ocean. CPESE facilitates national offering of the DataStreme Atmosphere and DataStreme Ocean courses and supports Project ATMOSPHERE leadership training workshops at the National Weather Service Training Center (Kansas City) for in-service K-12 educators. Over five years, about 3,000 teacher participants will earn graduate credits through a partnership with SUNY at Brockport and become confident Earth science educators capable of implementing engaging, pedagogically appropriate activities in their classrooms. These educators are expected to impact more than 30,000 additional educators and one million K-12 students. In addition to the professional development for in-service K-12 educators, CPESE enables the AMS to design curricula for introductory college-level Earth science courses, which help prepare pre-service educators. CPESE is built on a shared vision that highly trained educators are key to an environmentally and geo-scientifically literate public.
Aquarium of the Pacific's Ocean Science Center (SOS): Ocean-Earth Stories Connecting People, the Ocean and Climate Change
The Aquarium of the Pacific is creating an immersive exhibit for exploring the role of the ocean in climate change and its responses under different scenarios. The center of the experience is NOAA's Science On a Sphere (SOS), a proven platform for displaying a rich variety of earth system datasets that reveal global and large scale region processes and phenomena that are easily grasped by the general public. Combining SOS with a system of linked plasma screens allows additional local and regional stories that bring global messages down to a more personal level. Two programs are being developed initially focusing on: (1) implications of sea level rise, and (2) marine ecosystems. Both explore how the vulnerability of systems can be reduced and their resiliency enhanced through mitigation and adaptation.
Increasing Community Resilience to Weather-Related Events Through Public Education
This project will convene a workshop to develop a framework to support Coastal Ecosystem Learning Centers in delivering coordinated educational programming focused on weather-related events. The workshop will be organized by a collaborative group of aquariums and involve institutions from multiple regions of the United States. It will be held at the Aquarium of the Pacific in the winter or early spring of 2013.