Laura, another student who took the course in a previous semester, emphasized that "constructing, playing with, and manipulating a model" enhanced her learning much more than just memorizing the results of such a model.

Laura: The professors do show those kinds of things, but it's a lot more interactive for students to put a graph together themselves. I think that learning is enhanced by a student taking raw data and making a graph rather than just looking at the finished product. It'll mean less to them and they won't retain it, I think. And I can tell you that because of my own experiences. I knew a lot more about the carbon cycle after constructing a model, playing with it, and manipulating it than I ever did by memorizing the relationships.

Students also reported that manipulating the figures on a modeling program is instructive, because "tweaking the numbers" in one area affects everything else in the model. They said that seeing such models on paper would detract from their ability to envision such dynamic global interactions because they would only be involved in seeing results, as opposed to putting the models together on their own.

Ruth: If you're just in a science-based major and you don't like the way the results come out, you can tweak the numbers so that you get the right answer. But if you're using something like a modeling program and you tweak that number, you'll get the right number, but it still affects how everything else is viewed as well.

Beth: I think a lot of our assignments could have been done on paper-I just don't think it would have been as effective. When we did the STELLA models, we actually put them together. Our GSI [graduate student instructor] would show us how, but we actually did it. We actually would connect things to what our GSI would ask us. If we would have done that on paper, it wouldn't have been us doing it. It would have been the professor.

Amy: It's not just drawing the picture, you run it, too. You run the model.

Beth: And you make graphs.

According to Amy, independent investigation of real-world science and social issues allows students to contextualize facts and figures related to those issues. She explained, for example, that the deleterious effects of a "population boom" can only be determined upon considering the social background of the area in which such a boom occurs. ArcView allowed her to create such a real world background in a way that she "just doesn't get from somebody telling [her]."

Jean-Pierre (interviewer): How does ArcView go beyond the numbers? Can you express that?

Amy: We watched a movie in our first lab about a naturalist, Paul Ehrlich, who collects butterflies. But what he really did was make these big, doomsday predictions about the end of the world. He goes to Bihar, which is, I think, the poorest state in India, and he sees a lot of babies being born, and he comes back and says there's this population boom in India and nothing can be done, and it's the end of the world. But he doesn't understand that this is not a population boom, and that they always have that many children, and that a lot of those children will die. It's an agricultural state, so they need a lot of children because they work on the land. So then he gives all of these numbers and says that by the year 2050, India's population will grow by five times or something. I don't know the numbers. And that doesn't mean anything to me because I see him as coming from absolutely no background. The population has doubled before, we were worried, and now we have six billion and we're still doing okay. So what if we have another six billion? Maybe we'll still be okay. We really can't know.

But if I can take something like ArcView and look at the way population is dispersed, like if you tell me that there are a lot of people in New York City or in the State of New York, vs. telling me there are a lot of people, with their tradition, in India, that means a big difference. Because New York has complex sewage systems. So that means a lot to me. And ArcView takes those populations, and will split it up, and you can see how different population growth occurs in different parts of the country. It just adds another aspect to that that I just don't get from somebody telling me the population doubles. It gives you a complete picture. Instead of them just saying something that you take for truth automatically, it lets you formulate your own view, which might be a little more cynical, but is also more complete. And it gives you the ability to analyze as well, not to just repeat.

The Internet provides access to real-world data sets, acts as a tremendous resource for literature on global change issues, and simultaneously gives students on-line information gathering experience. Using the information from this interactive resource, Global Change students create their own website. This work both exposes them to global change issues and teaches them to critically examine the contents of websites that can be created and maintained by anyone.

Sam: We made our own website to show us how easy it is so that you become a bit more skeptical of websites you read. They are very subjective. We also did some research on the web for various things.

Julia: This year, it's required that every student make a website by the end of the course. Students pair up in groups of two or three and do a significant amount of research on a topic that was covered at some part of the course. Then they do a quick presentation to show their website and explain what they did. And I thought that was really useful because it was the first time I had done a significant web development project.