By Harry Mok

Tracy High School physics teacher Dean Reese could have taught his students about global warming with a lecture or had them read about it from a textbook.

Instead, he sent them foraging the San Joaquin Valley countryside looking for mustard plant leaves as part of a research project to test how much carbon dioxide in the air comes from burning fossil fuel.

The mustard leaf project is a collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where Reese is participating in a three-year Department of Energy Academies Creating Teacher Scientists (ACTS) internship.

"I think the students get excited to be a part of a research project like this," Reese said. "It can serve as a way to really motivate some students."

The University of California-affiliated Livermore Lab, Lawrence Berkeley and Los Alamos national laboratories are taking part in U.S. Department of Energy-funded programs designed to give middle and high school teachers hands-on research experience at some of the nation's top science centers. Through exposure to the latest, most-advanced research and laboratory tools, teachers can enhance their knowledge in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and improve the quality of classroom education in these fields.

Through these DOE lab programs and other teacher professional development courses at UC campuses, the university is contributing to the education of the next generation of budding scientists. These programs can also enhance a teacher's interest in teaching and help participants become leaders in their fields, said Livermore Lab science education manager Richard Farnsworth. The experience may encourage them to remain in a profession facing a shortage of qualified science, technology and math educators.

"Teachers aren't staying in the teaching profession, so I'm told, for 20 or 30 years any longer," said Farnsworth. "They're coming in for five to 10 years and then going onto other things. So, they need to become teacher leaders more quickly. And that's our goal here."

The ACTS internships are run at 14 national labs across the country. Participants receive an $800 stipend and spend four to eight weeks for three summers taking seminars, conducting research and working with mentor scientists. The program is open to U.S. citizens who are teachers in grades five through 12 at public or private schools.

Livermore also offers another similar program called the Teacher Research Academy in conjunction with the Edward Teller Education Center at UC Davis and other partners. The academies include workshops in fusion and astrophysics, biotechnology, environment and energy technologies and biophotonics.

Since 2005, about 550 teachers have completed the ACTS and Teacher Research Academy at the Livermore Lab. Typically the lab hosts about 110 teachers each summer in programs that also include a Science Teacher and Researcher internship run with the California State University system.

At the Berkeley Lab, 59 teachers have participated in the ACTS internship since it launched in 2004. In the 1990s, the Berkeley Lab hosted a similar Department of Energy program that had more than 200 participants, according to Susan Brady, department head for the Center for Science and Engineering Education.

Ashok Gadgil, a Berkeley Lab researcher and professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, is sharing one of his projects with teachers this summer. The experience will give them a different view of science than the one they get in textbooks, he said.

"The teachers who participate here as interns get exposed to how real science is done, which is sometimes different than the clean, nice sanitized version that appears in textbooks," said Gadgil. "There is a lot more struggle, uncertainty and hard, hard work to gain a little bit of extra scientific knowledge every time."

High marks for teachers

The hard work delivers benefits when teachers return to their classrooms. The Livermore Lab's Teacher Research Academy program has had a positive impact on participants, according to preliminary findings of a National Science Foundation-funded study by professor Jamal Abedi of the UC Davis School of Education.

"They organize their classrooms in much better ways than before," Abedi said of the teachers. "They think of their of classes more positively. They feel the training sessions have helped them improve their knowledge."

Abedi and his research team are surveying and interviewing 96 Teacher Research Academy participants, a control group of 97 teachers in other professional development programs and the students of both sets of educators.

More than 'chalk talk'

Reese and some of the other teachers in the lab programs have never done actual research before. They are taking their experiences into their classrooms with more applied learning and student collaboration in their school labs.

Reese, who also completed the Teacher Research Academy program, has students collect the mustard plants in late February and March from 20 locations around Tracy. They then send the mustard leaves to the Livermore Lab for testing at the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, where the carbon dioxide in them is analyzed to determine its source and whether it came from fossil fuels.

Reese learned to use the mass spectrometer during his lab internship, but the lab is testing his students' samples. He and Farnsworth said they want to expand this project throughout California and then nationally so that high school students across the country can participate.

"It connects students to the science on a different plane," Reese said. "It's not just ‘chalk talk.'"

Knowing the project could yield benefits for society made it more engaging for Ryan Ng, who took part in the mustard plant research for two years before graduating in June from Tracy High.

"Actually going out and doing field research was a good way for me to learn," said Ng, who will be a freshman at UC Berkeley in the fall. "I learn by doing, and it was really beneficial for me."

Science never stops

Cicely Mallett, a physical science teacher at Davis Middle School in Compton, wants to create that kind of learning experience for her students. The research experience she gains as a Berkeley ACTS intern this summer will help her to accomplish that.

"Science never stops, it consistently moves, so I want to move with it," said Mallett, who is conducting research into third-hand smoke, a newly evolving part of tobacco research.

Mallett is analyzing the health hazards associated with chemicals in the smoke that lingers in people's hair, clothing and other surfaces long after a cigarette is extinguished.

For Allen Boltz, working with engineering professor Gadgil in the Berkeley lab that created the Darfur stove provides a link between science and real-world applications that he can share with his chemistry students at Berkeley High School.

Boltz is testing the fuel efficiency of cooking stoves distributed as part of disaster relief efforts. The testing is to determine which models are best suited to distribute in places such as Haiti, which was devastated by an earthquake in January.

"They see an earthquake, they see devastation, they see the socioeconomic and the social implications of it," Boltz said of his students. "They don't see the scientific, underlying parts of helping people and taking those measurements."

What the teachers learn at the labs can help students, which is the ultimate goal for educators.

"It's making me a more knowledgeable teacher and that knowledge is important to convey to the students - that's the bottom line," said Fatemah Mizbani, a chemistry teacher at Berkeley High School who is studying third-hand smoke with Mallett. "A better researcher, a knowledgeable person, and I think that's what students need."

Harry Mok is principal editor in the UC Office of the President's Integrated Communications group. For more information, visit the UC Newsroom or follow us on Twitter.