Acadia Learning brings scientists, teachers, and students together in partnerships that result in useful research and effective science education.Click below to find activities, lessons, and resources about each of our major project strands.
Projects
The Maine Data Literacy Project offers a framework, instructional materials, and professional development for middle and high school teachers to help students gain skills and language for making sense of data and graphs as evidence to support their reasoning.
Why would anyone care about snow? Isn’t it just a nuisance, needing to be cleaned from roads and cars, causing delays, and making winter difficult? Actually, snow is really important in Maine – and in many places. It creates habitat for some animals; it gives cues to others, like fish, about when to migrate. Snow’s meltwater provides us with drinking water, but can also be a cause for concern when it melts quickly and causes floods. Snow is an economic engine too, with tourists flocking to Maine for skiing, snowmobiling, and winter sightseeing, among other activities.
This project investigates mercury concentrations in lakes, streams, soils, biota – like dragonfly larvae – and even people, and looks for good indicators of mercury status.
We will help the Bear Brook project scientists understand more about how nitrogen moves in other forested watersheds in different seasons of the year – information that will help them interpret patterns in nitrogen through time and space.
The Culvert Project involves teachers and students in researching stream ecology and culverts in their own communities.