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.
Secondary Analyses of the National Environmental Literacy Assessment: Phase I & II Students, Teachers, Programs and School Survey
Phase Three of the National Environmental Literacy Assessment (NELA) will analyze the relationship between middle school students' scores on the MSELS and other measured variables that may have critically impacted the development of environmental literacy in these students. Phases One and Two of the National Environmental Literacy Assessment (NELA) relied on four data collection instruments: The Middle School Environmental Literacy Survey (MSELS), the School Information Form, the Program Information Form, and the Teacher Information Form. The primary outcomes of these phases were to identify general levels of environmental literacy (measured by the MSELS) and to compare these levels both within and across the studies. Through the comparison of these data sets, we could identify schools in which grade level cohorts of students displayed markedly higher levels of environmental literacy variables than their peer cohorts at other schools. However, questions remain concerning the magnitude and influence of variables that were reported on those survey forms, as well as the relationships among variables measured by the MSELS scales. The major research questions that will guide this Phase are: 1) To what extent do the variables measured by these Forms during Phase One and Two appear to have contributed to or influenced students' environmental literacy scores; 2) How do these variables appear to interact with each other; and 3) What are the relative contributions of knowledge, affect, and skill variables to actual commitment or behavior. The resulting analyses of this study will be shared both through peer-reviewed publications as well as appropriate professional conferences.
Continuing of the National Ocean Sciences Bowl (NOSB) Competitions
The National Ocean Sciences Bowl (NOSB) is a nationally recognized high school academic competition. NOSB provides a forum for talented students to excel in science and math and introduces team members, their teachers, schools and communities to ocean sciences as an interdisciplinary field of study and a possible future career path. The program operates within a supportive ocean science learning community that involves the research community in pre-college education. Its focal point is a national competition that expands high school students' knowledge of the ocean and career pathways in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The program's goals are to: (1) cultivate environments which develop knowledgeable ocean stewards; (2) foster the use of the ocean as an interdisciplinary vehicle to teach science and mathematics; (3) reach out to and support the involvement of under-represented and geographically diverse communities in the ocean sciences; and (4) provide students with interactive education and career opportunities that develop critical thinking and workforce development skills.
Chesapeake Bay Watershed Education Scale-up Initiative
The Chesapeake Bay Watershed Education Scale-up Initiative is a project-based educational program that engages students in 21st century investigations of watershed concepts using real-time geospatial technology. The project's goal is to provide as many as 20,000 students across eight states with a dynamic, geographic learning experience that combines classroom learning activities with outdoor field experiences and technology-supported inquiry. To achieve this goal, the project will provide professional development for 400 educators across the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. This project builds on an existing educational citizen science project launched by the National Geographic Society in 2009 to study water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and has been designed to serve as a national model for the implementation of classroom and field-based learning.
Conservation Solutions: Developing America's Zoos and Aquariums into Centers for Leadership and Innovation
The Ocean Project will empower America's zoos, aquariums and science museums to become centers of innovation and effective leadership for healthy oceans and conservation in their communities, providing meaningful engagement opportunities for their 200 million annual visitors to become involved in helping with solutions. To help them do so, The Ocean Project is launching a competitive "Innovative Solutions Grants Program" that will provide financial resources for zoos, aquariums and science museums to develop innovative local and regional ocean conservation solutions and stewardship initiatives, with a special emphasis on engaging youth and minorities. To leverage and maximize the benefit of this small grants program, The Ocean Project will also provide the awardees with opportunities for capacity building in strategic communications and share the resulting new strategies and successes with our growing partner network of 2000 zoos, aquariums, science museums and other conservation and education organizations in all 50 States and worldwide.
Into the Woods (ITW)
Queens College’s Into the Woods (ITW) project is an environmental literacy program for New York City Elementary School Teachers enhancing content knowledge about the Earth System and extending their classrooms outdoors into Nature. The classrooms continue to evolve into school stewardship and service learning in partnerships with parks and environmental organizations. The ITW project starts with five Elementary Globe books that link science, math and literacy. Fiction becomes reality during field training that uses GLOBE books as blueprints for how teachers can guide their students to conduct their own research to enhance understanding of the environment. The project trains teachers to design and supervise grade-appropriate research projects using GLOBE protocols in local parks; support them during those projects; and host annual research symposia during which students present their results. The project's template of immersing teachers and students in environmental research is becoming a national model for improving environmental literacy in all school systems. The NYU Wallerstein Collaborative for Urban Environmental Education works in partnership with Into the Woods to connect teachers to the resources, materials, and strategies required to successfully implement environmental education, outdoor learning, service learning and hands-on experiences across all grade levels and curriculum areas.
Resilient Schools Consortium (RiSC) Program
Brooklyn College and the National Wildlife Federation Eco-Schools USA program in New York City created The Resilient Schools Consortium (RiSC) Program to increase the environmental literacy of middle school and high school students while providing opportunities for their voices to be heard. The City's long-term planning document, OneNYC, set forth a vision for a resilient city without specifying a role for students or including specific plans for their schools. This project addressed this gap by allowing students to interact with city, state and federal officials and resilience practitioners and present their ideas for resilience guidelines for NYC Public Schools. An active-learning RiSC Curriculum was developed by two middle school teachers in collaboration with their peers and the project team. The curriculum is available at https://riscnyc.org. RiSC teams at six middle schools and high schools used the curriculum to follow the UC Climate Resilience Toolkit’s Steps to Resilience. They learned about climate change and extreme weather, the vulnerability of their schools and their communities, options for addressing the risks, planned, and prioritized action, and executed small scale resilience projects on their school grounds when possible. Students were able to share what they had learned and have dialogue with professionals from government agencies and non-governmental about actions and solutions at two RiSC summits in June 2018 and June 2019. The RiSC program directly reached over 200 NYC public schools students through direct participation on the RiSC teams or RiSC-sponsored events, and indirectly reached hundreds more through the interaction of RiSC students with their peers. RiSC students were highly motivated by the program’s focus on action and the opportunity to speak directly to officials at the summits. The RiSC program also resulted in the creation of the New York City Climate and Resilience Education Taskforce (https://cretf.org), a group of NYC agencies, educators, and non-governmental organizations that are working towards providing climate and resilience education for all New York City students and their teachers. Key contributors to the success of the Resilient Schools Consortium program included New York Sea Grant and the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay.
Convening Young Leaders for Climate Resilience in New York State
The Wild Center’s Convening Young Leaders for Climate Resilience in New York State project increased climate literacy among high school students and teachers in New York City, the Catskills and the Adirondacks and gave students the leadership skills to help their communities respond to the impacts of climate change.
The Wild Center’s Convening Young Leaders for Climate Resilience in New York State project increased climate literacy among high school students and teachers in New York City, the Catskills and the Adirondacks and gave students the leadership skills to help their communities respond to the impacts of climate change. The program worked with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Delaware County, the Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School in Brooklyn, and Action for the Climate Emergency (formerly known as Alliance for Climate Education), along with NOAA, the New York State Office of Climate Change and NYSERDA. In the three project regions of New York State, project partners established Youth Climate Summits and Youth Climate Leadership Practicums as well as built on educators’ interests through Teacher Climate Institutes and communicated climate change science and resilience through community outreach activities. By the conclusion of the project, we had worked directly with 3,126 high school students, 1,124 teachers and 2,333 members of the public, each of whom gained a better understanding of the impacts of climate change in New York State, a greater capacity to make informed decisions about the threats to their own regions, and a stronger connection with other community members and ongoing resiliency work. Convening Young Leaders demonstrated significant leadership in connecting with New York State’s Climate Smart Communities program. Seven small, rural communities across New York State engaged in Climate Smart Communities (CSC) due to youth involvement. This emerged after partners at the NYS Office of Climate Change offered to present on CSC at multiple Youth Climate Summits. Students attended the CSC workshop, incorporated CSC into their climate action plans, contacted their local government, and encouraged them to join the program. Reaching out to municipal officials and presenting at community board meetings were tremendous learning opportunities for students, regardless of whether the municipalities joined the program. In 2020, two particularly engaged communities, Saranac Lake and Homer, received Bronze Certification through the CSC program and were formally recognized for their accomplishments.