Resources

Teaching Methods / Pedagogies

For an extensive set of pedagogies including the ones listed below, see the Pedagogy in Action website.

• Cooperative Learning involves students working in groups to accomplish learning goals.
• Gallery Walk activities get students out of their chairs to actively work together.
• Jigsaw When you have several related data sets you would like students to explore, a jigsaw may be an option. In a jigsaw, each student develops some expertise with one data set, then teaches a few classmates about it (and learns about related data sets from those classmates).
• Peer Review uses interaction around writing to refine students understanding.

Instructional Issues

• Course Design Tutorial - Includes sections on setting goals, designing your course, and following through.
• The Affective Domain in Teaching - The affective domain includes factors such as student motivation, attitudes, perceptions and values. Teachers can increase their effectiveness by considering the affective domain in planning courses, delivering lectures and activities, and assessing student learning. This module contains information and resources related to incorporating the affective domain into your course.
• Observing and Assessing Student Learning - Find activities for evaluating student learning, information on how to use different assessment methods in different learning environments, and information or researching teaching and learning.
• The Role of Metacognition in Teaching Geoscience - We can help our students to improve their learning by incorporating metacognition into our courses: by having them think about their thinking and by helping them to become aware of and monitor their learning strategies. This module contains information and resources that can help you strengthen your teaching by considering metacognition.
• The Math You Need, When You Need It - These modules cover 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. The project is designed to give students the quantitative knowledge that they need, just before they need to use it in their concurrent geoscience course. This program includes pre- and post-testing and self-paced modules.
• Quantitative Skills: Teaching Quantitative Literacy - These modules provide information and teaching materials about teaching quantitative skills in introductory level courses, with an additional section devoted to into-level geoscience courses. Topics include scientific notation, exponential growth/decay, probability, logarithms, trig, graphs, radioactive decay, deep time, recurrence interval, floods/flooding, population growth, stress and strain, and measuring earthquake magnitude.
• Quantitative Writing -

Science Standards and Policy Documents

• Earth Science Literacy Initiative
• National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) - Competencies for Science Teacher Preparation

Related SERC Resources

• Course Design Resources from Career Prep - This page contains a collection of articles and web resources related to course design, including topics such as how people learn, integrating research into courses, design related to Earth System Science and service learning formats, and assessment.