Teaching About Rates and Time

An understanding of geologic time is fundamental for all students in geoscience courses. Determining the rates of geoscience processes and dates of key events lie at the heart of much of geoscience research. Concepts associated with how geoscientists determine rates and dates are difficult for students to learn and challenging for instructors to teach.

Pedagogical approaches & considerations | Resource collections | Events | Get involved

Resources for Teaching About Rates and Time

Siccar Point, Scotland. Photo from Marli Miller's geology photo page, used with permission. James Hutton considered this angular unconformity to be conclusive evidence that geologic processes require enormously long times.

Pedagogical Approaches and Considerations

Learning Goals for Geologic Time is a list of possible learning objectives related to temporal concepts, based on the key ideas in the Earth Science Literacy Principles.
Using Analogies to Teach about Time summarizes best practices for teaching with analogies (based on cognitive science research) and reviews common analogies for teaching about time with those best practices in mind.
Visualizations with Teaching Tips is a small collection of visualizations, submitted by faculty teaching about time, with their comments on how they use these visualizations to teach about time.
Selected essays on teaching and learning about temporal concepts, from participants at the 2012 workshop on Teaching about Time and scholars of temporal learning.
Barriers to Teaching or Learning About Rates and Time: this list of barriers to learning about geologic time is a summary drawn from the experiences of applicants to the 2011 Temporal Learning Journal Club.
Temporal Learning Journal Club Findings is a brief summary of the key findings from each meeting of the Temporal Learning Journal Club. The Journal Club explores the cognitive underpinnings of understanding geologic time.

Resource Collections

Teaching Activities about geologic rates and time. One subset of these activities is our collection of posters about teaching activities, drawn from the presentations given at the 2005 GSA session on Geologic Rates and Time (see below).
Courses with a focus on geologic time.
Assessments of student learning, with a focus on geologic time or temporal concepts.
Visualizations relating to rates and time that are useful in the classroom.
Share a resource: If you have a teaching activity, course, assessment, or visualization you'd like to add to our collections, please do.

Events

2012 Workshop

We held a workshop on Teaching About Time at Arizona State University, in Tempe, AZ, in February 2012. This workshop brought together faculty teaching about time with researchers studying temporal learning to understand current best practice in teaching about time, to bring forward ideas from education and cognitive psychology that can inform improved practice, and to work together in ways that support improved teaching about time.

2011 Journal Club

From January to May, 2011, the Temporal Learning Journal Club met once a month to discuss readings from the geoscience and cognitive science literature. We explored the cognitive underpinnings of understanding geologic time and wrote a summary of what we learned.

Sessions at Professional Society Meetings

The Cutting Edge project has sponsored several sessions at professional society meetings related to teaching about time:

Time, Events, and Places: Understanding Temporal and Spatial Learning in Geoscience Education at the 2011 Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis, MN.
It's About Time: Teaching the Temporal Aspects of Geoscience at the 2005 Geological Society of America meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah. This session highlighted strategies for teaching how geoscientists date events using paleontology, radiometric dating, relative proxy data, and other techniques, as well as strategies for bringing cutting edge geochronologic research into the classroom.
Rates, Fluxes and Cycling in the Earth System: What Do We Know, What Are We Thinking at the 2004 fall AGU meeting in San Francisco, CA