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Private workspace for workshop participants

Workshop Program

Note: This workshop has already taken place. Presentations and workshop materials are linked in the program below.

Jump down to Monday morning, Monday afternoon, or Tuesday
Bateman Physical Sciences on ASU Tempe campus
Bateman Physical Sciences building at ASU-Tempe. Photo by Nikki Cassis. (Look for the big permineralized ("petrified") Araucarioxylon arizonicum tree trunk—Arizona's state fossil!—just outside the main building entrance on the south side.)

Sunday, February 26

5:00-6:00 Reception and Icebreaker at the Dietz Museum in Bateman Physical Sciences F-Wing (PSF on campus maps)

6:00-7:00 Dinner

7:00-7:30 Disciplinary perspectives panel: What do we want our students to understand about time? Why is that important?

Notes from these talks in the private participant workspace

7:30-8:30 Roundtable discussions and synthesis

  • Rates provide necessary context for decisions about sustainability
  • Perspective and frame of reference for human history and human events
  • Time is integral to understanding process (astronomical, geological, biological, environmental)
  • Time is abstract concept; understanding can help students grasp other abstract concepts
  • Important for students to understand scales of time that transcend human time
  • Important to bridge cultural differences in understanding time
  • Geology helps students better observe, reason, use evidence.
  • Understand recurrence intervals; frequency and variability (e.g., flood recurrence)
  • Students are challenged to understand and appreciate even generational time frames
  • Respect for the planet
  • Philosophical importance of deep time
  • Relationship between place and time
  • Time is a tool used to test hypotheses
  • Dispelling myths related to catastrophes, end of the world, 2012, etc.
  • We live in a constantly changing environment but changes are not all readily apparent because of different time scales
  • Time scales crucial to understanding climate change; students seem to grasp magnitudes better than rates
  • Significance of contingency in using observations of past changes to inform future predictions
  • Understand the time scales involved in actual (not SF) space travel—a truly long commute

Monday, February 27

Placing Events in Time: Timelines, Relative Dating, Numerical Dating
at the ASU Memorial Union (MU on campus maps)

8:45-9:00 Opening remarks

9:00-10:00 Computer-supported share fair: What we do

  • Pete Berquist
  • Gwen Daley
  • Brett Dooley
  • Maya Elrick
  • Sarah Gerken
  • Kathleen Gilbert and Maria Waller
  • Erika Grundstrom
  • Joann Hochstein
  • Francis Jones
  • Jessica Kapp and Phil Stokes
  • Margaret Mayer
  • Kevin Mullins
  • Roger Steinberg
  • Gina Szablewski
  • Rebecca Teed
  • Karen Viskupic
  • John Weber
Placing events in time

10:00-11:30 Invited talks: Placing events in time

11:30-11:45 Break

11:45-12:30 Discussion: Challenges and solutions for placing events in time

See notes from each group in the workspace:
  • Group 1: Joann, Pam, Ilyse, Sarah G., and Margaret
  • Group 2: Pete, Maya, Noah, Gina, and Marguerite
  • Group 3: Erika, Roger, Cara, Susan, and Karen
  • Group 4: Francis, Kevin, John C., Kathy and Maria
  • Group 5: Gwen, Mark, Erica, May, and John W.
  • Group 6: Jessica, Phil, Brett, and Rebecca

12:30-2:00 Lunch

2:00-2:15 Individual reflection time

Rates and Durations: Deep Time, Short Time, Lengths of Times, Rates, Changes in Rates
Concurrent session, Teaching About Time workshop

2:15-3:30 Invited talks: Rates and durations

3:30-3:45 Break

3:45-4:45 Concurrent small group sessions:

4:45-5:45 Small group/whole group discussions on teaching about time

  • Differently prepared students - clickers can be used to level playing field
  • Assessment - backward design, importance of understanding the expert understanding to know what you want to assess.
  • Geochronology - How to build trust in radiometric ages -- start with smaller logical jumps and scaffold way to long term radiometric dating; using multiple converging lines of evidence.
  • Group 1 - Lack of familiarity with units generally makes understanding scales more difficult.
  • Group 2 - Why should someone care -- connections to cultural values and processes like energy unit -- can't understand this without understanding rates.
  • Group 3 - Local examples as motivation for understanding time scales.
  • Group 4 - A good place for starting conversations about processes is to situate learning as leading to a decision about actions.
  • Group 5 - How do we use earth's past to motivate decisions about our future -- important to establish the possibility of something (earth could be different, because it has been in the past) followed by discussion of probability.
  • Group 6 - Importance of practicing evidence-based arguing for beliefs.
  • How important it is to use analogies knowing how they work and how they fail -- loose use of analogy may be harmful - how to help students make the analogical mapping.
  • Students envision objects as unchanging where geoscientists see them as steps in a process.
  • Sequence may be easier to teach than duration.
  • Experts are facile moving from one scale of time to a radically different one -- students need more scaffolding to do this -- there are suggestions for how to scaffold this and some tools on the Rates and Time website.
  • Making estimates at various levels of accuracy and not getting stuck with the search for a more refined answer than we need.
  • The weaving together of narrative and numeric understanding to create a rich enough understanding of a time period to give it appropriate weight in our minds.
  • Individual reflection on key insights and big challenges
  • Table discussion of insights and challenges
  • Importance of a story of geological history - opportunities for creativity and outside knowledge
  • Importance of scaffolding in general (meant different things to different people)
  • Time - time analogies vs. time - space analogies: use the hour of the class; assign students to mark geologic events on this scale verbally through the hour
  • How to get people to care -- including students at higher levels and non students
  • Teaching to the difference between naive understanding versus misconceptions
  • Why do students not 'get' radiometric dating/geochronology
  • What are our learning goals - what do we want them to remember -- have to start with this, e.g.
    • Importance of teaching how scientists work - how we string together evidence
    • Need to step back and ask more basic questions - e.g. what is a clock as a basis for understanding assumptions, strengths etc.
    • How important and to what depth do we them to understand magnitude -- more important to understand that the Precambrian is long than to know its exact length?
  • Value of understanding what students know/don't know at outset to gauge level and focus of instruction -- have to know what questions to ask to be able to do this well -- how is this base level related to the learning goals for the course
  • Process of taking exams and receiving feedback helps student develop metacognition and understanding of what they know (true, false, don't know, how certain are you)
  • Research targets:
    • Does the process of deriving a clock or calculating time or dating things enhance students' ability to understand concepts of time?
    • Do they understand the diagrams we present better if they create the diagrams themselves?
    • How do different aspects of temporal understanding interconnect or not interconnect to support different geologic concepts?

Teaching About Time workshop

5:45-6:15 Plan for tomorrow - set up working groups

Ideas for working groups:
  • Teaching geochronology/radiometric dating
  • How to estimate time
  • learning goals
  • teaching time with analogies
  • pre-course assessment
  • motivating students

6:15-6:30 Personal reflection; road check

Dinner on your own (We are hoping you will form small groups and not eat alone--we'll have recommendations for restaurants)


Tuesday, February 28

8:45-9:15 Opening remarks; establish working groups

9:15-11:30 Working group time

Teaching About Time workshop

11:30-12:15 Reconvene and shuffle groups for feedback

12:15-1:30 Lunch - with possible worktime

EarthTime project description (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 579kB Mar2 12) - Mark Schmitz

1:30-3:00 Working group time

3:00-3:30 Break

3:30-4:00 Working group reports

4:00-4:45 Discuss synthesis report in the private participant workspace

4:45-6:00 Next steps, concluding remarks, and workshop evaluation

6:30 Dinner at Z'Tejas


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