CER Practice: Climate Change Arctic Sea Ice Bundle (Biology)

Description

Arctic sea ice is disappearing, and the responses on the table range from the practical to the audacious. This bundle puts students in the role of environmental scientists evaluating geoengineering and conservation strategies for the Arctic — not reading about them, judging them.

The three strategies could not be more different in kind: thicken the ice directly, cut the pollution that darkens and melts it, or brighten the clouds above it. Students who work through all three come out with a genuinely comparative understanding of how climate intervention is argued about in the real world.

What’s inside

• Arctic Sea Ice Thickening — students evaluate a proposed geoengineering strategy to rebuild ice thickness.
• Black Carbon Reduction — students evaluate strategies to slow Arctic warming by cutting soot emissions.
• Marine Cloud Brightening — students evaluate a proposal to reflect more sunlight away from the Arctic by brightening marine clouds.

The three activities total $12.75 purchased separately; the bundle is $10.25.

How it runs in class

Each activity runs the same evaluation arc, so the bundle builds a rhythm: state the problem, examine the evidence, evaluate feasibility, determine a recommendation. Run them across a week of an Arctic or climate unit and finish with the comparison the bundle is built for — three defensible recommendations, three different theories of intervention, and a class ready to argue about which deserves support. It’s also a clean way to present geoengineering honestly: as proposals with evidence and tradeoffs, not as science fiction or silver bullets.

Built on the S.E.E.D. Framework

All three activities run the complete S.E.E.D. Framework — State the Problem, Examine the Evidence, Evaluate Feasibility, Determine a Recommendation — and each ends in CER recommendation writing.

Standards alignment

NGSS: HS-LS2-7, HS-ESS3-4, HS-LS2-6. Grades 8–12 · Biology, Earth Sciences, Environment.

End the bundle with a ranking exercise: students order the three strategies by the strength of their own recommendations and defend the ordering. The disagreements are the point — reasonable scientists weight scale, reversibility, and side effects differently — and the exercise shows students that a well-argued second place is worth more than an unexamined consensus.

Want one strategy first? Try the Sea Ice Thickening activity on its own. New to the Arctic line? Open the unit with the free Polar Bear Observation activity from the Free Library.