Teaching Quantitative Skills in the Geosciences

Quantitative skills are an essential tool for both the geoscientist and the citizen. Helping students master skills ranging from simple arithmetic or graphing, to sophisticated use of equations and models is an integral aspect of teaching geoscience at the undergraduate level.

This website provides information on the issues involved in teaching quantitative skills and methods for doing so as well as additional resources and a community of other faculty who are all attempting this challenging task.

Teaching Techniques and Tips: Examples and discussion of teaching methods currently used to teach quantitative skills in the geosciences.

Activities for Class and Lab: A collection of teaching materials for faculty focusing on quantitative skills in a geoscience context.

Student Resources: Resources for students to learn quantitative skills on their own.

Issues: An overview of issues and a starting point for discussion. Why is teaching quantitative skills an important part of geoscience education? What do we mean by quantitative skills? Which skills are important? What can we learn from the other sciences and mathematics?

Whats Going On?: Calendar of upcoming and recent workshops and conferences.

Join the Discussion: This email list includes both geoscientists and mathematicians and provides an excellent venue for discussing challenges in teaching quantitative skills.

What's New?

New Paper: Making Undergraduate Geoscience Quantitative
This article in EOS draws together many of the lessons learned about engaging geoscience students in a quantitative way derived from activities associated with the development of this site and associated workshops.

New Project: The Math You Need, When You Need It
This new website covers quantitative topics that are important in introductory geoscience courses. Each topic includes a page for the instructor, quantitative information for the students, a set of practice problems and culminates in an on-line quiz that is automatically graded and submitted to the instructor.