Initial Publication Date: April 7, 2011

Teaching Mineralogy, Petrology and Geochemistry Activity Review Process

Background

The On the Cutting Edge program is conducting a comprehensive review of all our teaching collections, and the MPG teaching activities will be the first to undergo this process. Our goal is to develop a comprehensive and coherent set of teaching activities that will serve the geoscience education community for years to come. The geoscience community has repeatedly asked for access to high quality, peer-reviewed instructional resources, and this is our response to this expectation. And, NSF has encouraged us to help design and implement review mechanisms as a model for other (geo)education projects. In planning for this review activity:

We have developed an on-line review that will facilitate the process.

Our basic review criteria focus on a) scientific veracity, b) alignment of goals, activity and assessment, c) pedagogical effectiveness, d) usability, and e) completeness of the ActivitySheet to help an instructor or student decide if this is an appropriate activity for their instructional needs.
We have created a scoring rubric (Microsoft Word 37kB Mar21 11) to help calibrate reviews.

We have assigned review teams from the 2011 Teaching MPG workshop according to disciplinary interests from the workshop application form.

We know that we all teach MPG topics from across the curriculum, and hopefully the activities you've been assigned will address many of your primary interests.

We have also assigned teaching activities from across our collections to topical groups.

Some of these activities have been created and reviewed in other projects. That's fine. We also need to conduct our own more extensive review of these resources.
Please help us identify ways in which these teaching activities can be re-purposed across the MPG disciplines and the larger geoscience curriculum
Be on the lookout for activities that could be used for instruction in MPG topics in a variety of introductory geoscience courses.

We're asking all the participants of the 2011 Teaching MPG workshop to contribute to this review process.

The online review will take place during March-May 2011, in preparation for the summer workshop.
During that time period we're asking that all participants contribute 5-10 reviews.

Review Process

Please use your best judgment as a geoscientist and educator in reviewing these MPG teaching activities. The goal of this review process is to develop the best possible teaching activities in support of MPG instruction. Please write your reviews in the same manner you would like to receive them--your helpful, constructive advice will be most appreciated.

1. You can access the teaching activities you've been assigned to review by following this link:

Access the REVIEW TOOL

You will need to use your SERC account name (your e-mail address) and password to get access. Your assigned activities will be displayed in a new screen.

2. Follow the link that will take you to the resource you choose to review. The assigned ActivitySheet will open in a new window. There you will be able to see the description of the activity and access all related documents and files for you to review.

3. Use the "Review It" link to take you to the review tool. There you will find a series of guiding questions to help you formulate your review. Please provide any constructive comments that can be used by the authors and editors to help improve this activity.

4. We have developed a scoring rubric (Microsoft Word 37kB Mar21 11) to help calibrate the reviews across this project. This should provide you some guidance in rating the activity in the five review areas.

5. Please pace yourself. We would like to have the review process completed by the end of May so that we can showcase the results at the 2011 Teaching Mineralogy, Petrology and Geochemistry workshop. Everyone attending the workshop should plan on submitting 5-10 reviews.

6. Conflicts of Interest: please let us know if we have inadvertently assigned you one of your own activities, or if there are other conflicts of interest that were not apparent to us. We can easily reassign such an activity to another reviewer and substitute another more appropriate activity for you to review.

Outcomes

Each teaching activity will receive two peer reviews. The Associate Editors will forward recommendations to the Cutting Edge management team, and we will a) be happy to inform authors that their contributions have been recognized in our "Exemplary" collections or b) will forward your recommendations to the authors with encouragement to make revisions to the activities towards recognition in the Exemplary teaching activity collection. At the end of the review process, we hope that we will have a compehensive and coherent collection of teaching activities that will be of the highest quality for use by the entire MPG community and beyond!