May 2009 Journal of Geoscience Education

Students and the general public are often told that the chronology of ancient events is known with high confidence, but the methods used to determine how long ago an event occurred are usually not described or even mentioned. This gives the impression that the methods are either not important or that only scientists can understand them. Fortunately, many of the techniques are understandable if properly presented. Here one key method of dating ancient materials, argon/potassium radioisotope dating, is described in detail. In addition, a dramatic example of its calibration is described using the geology of the Hawaiian Islands. Sample lessons used in a high school physics class are described and discussed.

Electronic course materials, such as videos, PowerPoint presentations, and animations, have become essential educational tools in classroom-based geoscience courses to enhance students' introduction to basic geological concepts. However, during field trips, the ability to offer students these electronic conceptual supports is lacking where students and faculty are often without access to the electrical grid. The video iPod offers an inexpensive and reliable means by which to provide students access to a wide range of electronic course materials during field trips. GeoJourney, a nine-week field-based interdisciplinary introductory geoscience program at Bowling Green State University, is the first geology field program to use the entire range of the video iPod's capabilities to support electronic course materials while in the field. A video iPod was issued to each student at the beginning of the program, along with a battery back-up and a DC charging cable which was plugged into a custom wiring harness installed in the transport vehicles. Students were able to use the iPods during travel time, in the field on hikes and projects, and in their tents at night. Types of materials included videos, still images, animations, text, audio files, and enhanced podcasts. Students' response to the use of the iPods is overwhelmingly positive and suggest their use on GeoJourney also reduces 'novelty space'.

Collaborative exams, with subsections in which students have an opportunity to work with each other, are not yet widely used in introductory geoscience courses. This type of exam structure, with other participatory teaching strategies, was employed in two different courses, and results were found to provide a sensitive and revealing tool for analyzing the progress of students' individual and collaborative learning throughout the semester. A somewhat different implementation of the collaborative exams in each course showed that overall student performance was significantly improved compared to performance in the individual part, even for middle and highest-achieving thirds of the student population, and progressive improvements in performance were followed through the semester. The implementation of collaborative exams in the first course involved an aspect of exam grading that provided an incentive for collaboration: the "jackpot effect", which provided insight into the dynamics of peer interaction. The simpler implementation in the second course used a different approach in which the collaborative tests were less important to the total class grade, but also showed improvement in students' individual performance. Wider application of these methods could make a critical difference in reversing student apathy toward science in colleges and universities.

A classroom of eighteen fourth and fifth graders in the Columbus, Ohio Public School system successfully evaluated how people obtain fossil fuels, how they are limited in nature, and how they can develop renewable energy solutions. Students modeled oil-drilling using: chocolate syrup, rice cereal, a baster, and a clear container. Chocolate oil became more difficult to pump as oil supplies diminished. While pumping, chocolate oil spills contaminated the drill hole and students excavated the polluted substrate. Students next learned more about oil spills by conducting their own
clean-ups of vegetable oil in mini tap water oceans. Students learned that 'solving' the problem of the oil spill created new problems, including uninhabitable soapy oceans. This mimicked the failure of current technology to easily remediate oil spills. Finally to cultivate a better understanding of renewable energy, students built and tested solar ovens and discussed their benefits and limitations. After completing these activities, students showed a significant average improvement from their pretest to posttest understanding of renewable and nonrenewable resources. In addition, students were interested and excited to act on what they had learned.

Five high schools in British Columbia, Canada, participated in an atmospheric sciences project during the winter of 2006-07 established by researchers at the University of Calgary. Precipitation gauges and temperature and relative humidity probes were installed at each school and students were asked to collect a water sample each day that precipitation accumulated. These samples were used to trace the evolution of stable water isotopes across southwestern Canada. Researchers visited schools to talk about water resources and climate change, and data were collated and given to teachers to use in an atmospheric science project. The participatory nature of this project gave students exposure to data collection and basic analytical techniques used in atmospheric sciences. This was a first attempt at collaboration between our research group and secondary schools, and we point out a number of issues that arose in our study with respect to a successful two-way engagement between researchers and students. These include school engagement, the geographic distribution of the participating schools, the time span of the project, and the time available to schools. There are also a number of data quality considerations, but we were successful overall in acquiring a unique, high-quality dataset that satisfies our research objectives.

Very few Native American students pursue careers in the geosciences. To address this national problem, several units at the University of Oklahoma are implementing a geoscience "pipeline" program that is designed to increase the number of Native American students entering geoscience disciplines. One of the program's strategies includes the development of an undergraduate course called 'Earth Systems of the Southern Great Plains.' The course focuses on geoscience topics that relate to the southern plains (particularly Oklahoma), emphasizes "sense of place," integrates indigenous knowledge and geoscience content, makes use of Kiowa stories and metaphors, and uses Native American Art as a vehicle of learning. Students in the course are required to put living indigenous philosophies into practice through teaching activities and the construction of geoscience models using everyday materials. The course is designed to highlight the integrated nature of Earth processes, elicit students' experiences through exploration of case studies
illustrating links between indigenous knowledge and Earth processes, and demonstrate the process of practicing science. Formative student evaluations are providing useful information and the course is evolving. Preliminary assessment results suggest that integrating Native American culture, art, and geoscience content is a successful approach.

Weather events are part of every student's experience, and are controlled by basic principles involving the behavior of matter and energy. Despite this, many students have difficulty explaining simple atmospheric phenomena, even after exposure to primary and secondary science curricula. This study investigated the level to which undergraduates understood the formation of clouds in the atmosphere, and how effectively they incorporated fundamental principles of matter and energy into their explanations. Interviews with earth science undergraduates at the University of Maine indicated that many had trouble with the correct identification of water in its different states, and were unable to name the sources of moisture in certain cases of cloud formation. If these misconceptions can be recognized and addressed directly by instructors, the potential exists to lead students to form better and more accurate mental models of weather.

Physical World is a one-semester course designed for elementary education majors, that integrates earth science, astronomy, and physics. The course is part of a four-course set that explores science concepts, processes, and skills, along with the nature of scientific practice, that are included in state and national standards for elementary school science. Geoscience concepts, such as water and seismic waves, are used to illustrate general principles of physics, such as wave transmission, refraction, reflection, and interference. Laboratories are drawn from both introductory physics and earth science courses and have been redesigned to have a strong inquiry component. Pre-assessments were used to evaluate students' prior knowledge of key ideas. The use of pyramid tests measurably enhanced student performance. A major theme of the course is how science is represented (and misrepresented) in the media. Pedagogical challenges encountered in the course are due to various factors, two main ones being lack of previous experience with the natural world
among a largely urban student body and the diversity of material that the course covers.

From 2005-2007, 86 pre-service science teachers surveyed 2,535 middle and high school students in 27 rural, suburban and urban school districts in Northern Illinois on their attitudes about science. The survey consisted of ten questions on a ten-point Likert scale covering interest in science, attitudes about scientists and student confidence in, and desire to do science. These students no longer hold most stereotypes cited in the literature. For example, all students feel that girls are capable of science, that science is interesting and that their parents would be proud of them if they were to become scientists. However, very few students felt they might want to become scientists. Previous attempts to increase the numbers of students participating in science by targeting these stereotypes have been effective in changing student attitudes about science but have failed to increase the desire among students to become scientists. These students feel they can do science; they simply do not want to do science. This paradox is a different kind of problem than has been previously identified in the geoscience community and will require a retooling of approaches and programs wishing to increase student participation.

For 58 years, the Journal of Geoscience Education (JGE) has served a vital function as the dominant peer-reviewed dissemination mechanism for curriculum, development of new materials and methods for instruction, as well as research into the effectiveness of these interventions, has become increasingly important to the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) community, and to all communities of learners. In addition, fundamental research into the nature of complex cognition in adult learners is emerging across STEM fields, with new and exciting efforts finding traction within the geosciences. As the longest-standing education journal focusing on a specific STEM discipline, JGE has the opportunity to lead the dissemination of the highest-quality pedagogy and research evolving out of the current resurgence in STEM educational activities. Now and in the future, JGE is expected to be a publication venue for a diversity of material, including new curricular approaches, research into the effectiveness of instruction, and fundamental education and cognitive investigations.

Here we argue that there are several reasons why students are still graduating in droves with inadequate views of the Nature of Science (NOS) and strong anti-evolutionary sentiments. 1) Science educators often neglect teaching the NOS because they feel pressure to cover a certain amount of science "content," and it takes too much time to adequately teach the NOS. 2) But even if they do address the NOS, scientists and science educators often harbor naïve views of the NOS similar to their students' views. 3) Furthermore, even those who do have more sophisticated views of the NOS typically soft-pedal those aspects of the NOS that might lead their students to adopt more sophisticated views. 4) Science educators usually neglect to discuss students' religious objections to scientific theories because they are typically not very religious themselves. but 5) if they do, they often make the situation worse by making outrageous gaffes regarding the science/religion interface. 6) Finally, standard resources meant to help science teachers teach the NOS and deal with religious objections actually encourage instructors to softpedal certain aspects of the NOS and make naïve claims about the science-religion interface. In the following sections, we further explain and support the above characterization of this complex problem, and then describe a suggested course of action.

Here we describe a method for teaching the NOS called "Science as Storytelling," which was designed to directly confront naive realist preconceptions about the NOS and replace them with more sophisticated ideas, while retaining a moderate realist perspective. It was also designed to foster a more sophisticated understanding of the science-religion interface, where occasional science-religion conflicts are seen as inevitable in cases where religious beliefs incorporate supernatural intervention in the natural world. We evaluated the program as implemented in a geology course for pre-service elementary teachers at Bringham Young University, ans showed that it was successful at helping students understand the tentative and creative aspects of scientific thought, and fostering more positive attitudes toward science. Our evaluation also showed that the students adopted a more irenic stance toward science-religion conflict. These results directly contradict fears that emphasizing the creative and tentative aspects of the NOS, and admitting that science and religion sometimes conflict, will cause students to reject scientific claims to an even greater degree.

The Urban Schoolyards project is a two year partnership with a university Earth Science Department and the surrounding urban elementary schools. The goal of the project was to develop the capacity of elementary teachers to teach earth science lessons using their schoolyards and local parks as field sites. The university personnel developed lessons and resources which were taught to the teachers during a summer institute. The teachers then implemented these lessons with their elementary classes during the following school year. It was found that 70% of the teachers who participated in the summer institutes used their schoolyards and local parks for science lessons during the following school year.

Although an understanding of radiometric dating is central to the preparation of every geologist, many students struggle with the concepts and mathematics of radioactive decay. Physical demonstrations and hands-on experiments can be used to good effect in addressing this teaching conundrum. Water, heat, and electrons all move or flow in response to generalized forces (gradients in pressure, temperature, and electrical potential) that may change because of the flow. Changes due to these flows are easy to monitor over time during simple experiments in the classroom. Some of these experiments can be modled as exponential decay, analogous to the mathematics of radioactive decay, and can be used to help students visualize and understand exponential change. Other, similar experiments produce decay or change that is not exponential. By having classes, in small groups, conduct several experiments involving flows, a learning synergy can be encouraged in which the physical and mathematical similarities of flow processes are emphasized. For the best results, students should be asked to analyze the experimental data, using graphs and algebraor calculus as appropriate to the class, to determine the nature of the decay process and to make predictions, either forward or backward in time as would be done for radiometric dating. Basic quantitative skills are strengthened or developed as part of these activities. Encouraging a number of important geologic processes in the same mathematical processes hyelp build a quantitative literacy that can be transferred and applied to the other processes.

When teaching phase partitioning concepts for solutes in porous media, and other multi-phase environmental systems, explicitly tracking the environmental media phase with which a substance of interest (SOI) is associated can enhance the students' understanding of the fundamental concepts and derivations. It is common to explicitly track the customary mass, length, and time based units. The expansion described here is to also track the specific media phases to which these fundamental units apply. This additional step forces students to think more carefully about concentrations and other terms. This paper presents a consistent system of notation for teaching these concepts and some examples of how this system is used. The examples presented here are based on solid-liquid partitioning and a linear Freundlich adsorption isotherm, but could also be applied to other environmental media, such as air and biological tissue, as well as other partitioning models. This approach is most appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

It is important that students understand the "open-ended" nature of scientific knowledge and the correct relationship between facts and theory. One way this can be taught is to examine a past controversy in which the interpretation of facts was contested. The controversy discussed here, with suggestions for teaching, is "Expanding Earth versus Sea Floor Spreading." Although this was a short and limited controversy within the mainstream scientific community, it has the advantage of having primary sources that are accessible to students to read for themselves. What makes this controversy intriguing is the later conversion of one of the protagonists (Tuzo Wilson) to tectonics. The controversy is framed explicitly in terms of several criteria for agreeing on the optimal theory: it is an exercise in what has been termed "theory choice" by Thomas Kuhn. Framing the controversy in this way can teach students a great deal about the emergence of scientific theories as well as criteria that can be used to judge ideas in a mature fashion.