UMaine Hutchinson Center Offers Professional Development Opportunity to Midcoast Educators

Belfast, ME – This fall, the University of Maine Hutchinson Center offered three sessions for local middle and high school teachers to explore data literacy in collaboration with the Maine Data Literacy Project.

As part of its outreach mission, the UM FHC has been providing professional development opportunities to local middle and high school teachers in collaboration with the Maine Data Literacy Project.  The Hutchinson Center plans to offer this program again starting in early 2017.

The ability to turn data into useful information is a key skill in science and is critical to conducting smart business and informing policy. The group explored strategies for building students’ skills in graphing and interpreting data about Maine’s environment and communities, with goals of making science, math, and social sciences more relevant to students and building their evidence-based learning skills.

Dr. Molly Schauffler, a University of Maine Assistant Research Professor in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences, the Center for Research in STEM Education, and a leader in the Maine Data Literacy Project, facilitated these professional development sessions to teachers through the midcoast area.

The Maine Data Literacy Project is an informal partnership between scientists and educators at the University of Maine, the Schoodic Institute, and middle and high school science and math teachers in Maine who are committed to building data literacy among Maine students.

For more information or to pre-register for upcoming workshops contact Molly Schauffler at 207.338.8038, mschauff@maine.edu.

The University of Maine, founded in Orono in 1865, is the state’s only public research university. It celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2015. UMaine is among the most comprehensive higher education institutions in the Northeast and attracts students from Maine and 45 other states, and 65 countries. It currently enrolls 10,922 total undergraduate and graduate students who can directly participate in groundbreaking research working with world-class scholars. The University of Maine offers doctoral degrees in 35 fields, representing the humanities, sciences, engineering, and education; master’s degrees in nearly 70 disciplines; 90 undergraduate majors and academic programs; and one of the oldest and most prestigious honors programs in the U.S. The university promotes environmental stewardship, with substantial efforts campuswide aimed at conserving energy, recycling and adhering to green building standards in new construction. For more information about UMaine, visit umaine.edu.