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Cycle B Team: Model Building

• If needed, review the sample ESS Analysis
• Review the ESS Analysis Rubric.
• Using your team's original or revised problem statement, build an ESS model.
• Post your best ideas in your team's Discussion Space.
• Read your teammates' analyses.
• Develop a team analysis.
• As a team, develop support for the relationships with evidence from your reading and research.
• After completing the ESS analysis, be sure to address the request for recommendations in the PBL Tasking.
• Complete the ESS Analysis Rubric.
• Upload your team assignment to your Portfolio (ESSEA).

Cycle B Team: Model Building

Assignment

1. You and your team need to think in terms of an iterative, or evolving, process regarding the gathering of information as you move toward your findings (PBL Step 8). When ideas begin to emerge several times in different discussions, it is a sign that you are developing a shared understanding. The focus of this team assignment is to build an ESS model to support the problem statement you developed in Cycle A.

2. Continue gathering information to answer your teammates' questions from the Cycle A team assignment with evidence from experience, research, and reading to support or refute the team's ideas. You and your team will gather, organize, analyze, and interpret information from multiple sources. Exchange ideas; think about solutions; weigh alternatives; and consider the pros and cons of potential courses of action (PBL Step 7). As new information comes to light, analyze it for its reliability and usefulness and also for its impact on the direction that the problem is taking, as well as for its effect on the very nature of the problem. Therefore, you may need to revise or modify your problem statement (PBL Step 6). Post your best ideas in the discussion space.

3. Your team's findings as they relate to the problem statement: a brief opening summary of supportable ideas and conclusions (recommendations, solutions, or alternatives) based on the information your team has collected, particularly for your ESS analysis, over Cycles A and B (PBL Step 8).

4. Statements about the relationships: detailed accounts of all the changes and impacts (revealing your understanding of interrelationships of the spheres and the event in the Earth System Diagram) that led your team to the conclusions put forth in your recommendations or solutions (findings). Make sure you include the systemic relationships, called causal chains, where multiple spheres and the event are involved in complex and interrelated changes. In a system, nothing occurs in isolation. Each causal chain should include S > S > S interactions.

5. Evidence: For evidence that your thinking is accurate, consider information, examples, and corroboration from readings, web sites, CD-ROMs, analogies, or experimental results and experts. Combine these to give credence to your relationship statements in the causal chains. Submit your team's analysis for a grade.

6. In the event that you have reached this point and are unsure about what steps 7 and 8 might look like in doing an ESS Analysis, check out the Yellowstone Fire ESS Analysis Model