A substantial grant will allow the University of Idaho’s McCall Outdoor Science School to keep its efforts at educating K-12 students booming.
The school received $60,000 to augment their youth science programs from the Paul G. Allen Foundation. 

The main beneficiary is a two year project that aims to develop evaluation techniques for their K-12 programs that UI graduate students get credit to teach.
Community Development Coordinator for MOSS Lynne Westerfield said UI students involved in the program have worked with around 2,600 K-12 students in the past year, and have educated more than 5,000 since its founding in 2001. 
“K-12 students come (to McCall) and attend the outdoor program,” she said. “Shifts last about five days. (It is) a community with people who are really excited about teaching and finding the best way to teach science.”

Although kids reap most of the benefits of the science based school, they definitely don’t stand alone. UI graduate students teaching them are able to live on the grounds, work with children and learn right along with them.
Westerfield said participating students reside at the venue for the semester and receive 15 credits for their work with the program. She said they also take classes and learn about topics such as outdoor leadership and community ecology.

“For some of (the students), it’s a pretty amazing experience,” she said.  “It is teaching and learning for them at the same time. It can be a really powerful experience.”
The efforts are organized through a partnership between the Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute and Ponderosa State Park and the UI’s College of Natural Resources.
The environment stresses hands on learning techniques that hope to provide students with alternative methods to understand the field of science. Students experience a variety of activities at the school ranging from forest ecology to working with microscopes and is aimed to be unique from their ordinary classroom studies.

A news release regarding the grant said MOSS education coordinator Karla Bradley and Jernie Pegg from UI’s College of Education are teaming up to create and distribute the “authentic assessments” that deviate from the typical way of
testing. 
The release said money from the grant will go towards the tests that are “composed of performance tasks and activities that require judgment and innovation” and are “designed to stimulate real world challenges.”

“This grant allows us to develop authentic assessments which allow us to get to higher order process skills,” Westerfield said. “It gives us another way to test the higher order processes that our program really works to improve.”

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