for student autonomy, relevance, collaboration with peers, and learning-by-doing."

The processes comprising the global environment are interconnected. Many of the major environmental issues of our time have driven scientists to study how these connections operate on a global basis – to understand Earth as a system.

so that they can be productively investigated; systematically analyzing and integrating data to serve as evidence to evaluate claims; and communicating and critiquing ideas in a scientific community are vital parts of inquiry. However, they tend to be missed when students are taught a scripted procedure designed to

obtain a particular result in a decontextualized investigation. Furthermore, these higher-level reasoning and problem-solving practices require a reasonable depth of familiarity with the content of a given scientific topic if students are to engage in them in a meaningful way. Debates over content versus process are not in step with the current views of the nature of science…. Science is seen as a fundamentally social enterprise that is aimed at advancing knowledge through the development of theories and models that have explanatory and

predictive power and that are grounded in evidence. In practice this means that content and process are deeply intertwined."(NRC, 2012b, p. 127)