GeoFORCE Texas at the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences is a very large, well-funded youth diversity outreach program created to introduce high school students to STEM, especially the geosciences. Each year the program supports over 400 students from rising 9th to rising 12th grade, engaging them in out-of-state field experiences and hands-on research projects. Each year full-time staff solicit, hire, and train summer temporary staff; execute institutional contracts; recruit underrepresented student participants; communicate with counselors, community leaders, parents and guardians; engage with corporate sponsors and major donor; plan academy field stops, inclusive instruction and activities; acquire essential youth mental health first aid and other safety training; etc. This work tends to go unnoticed by researchers, grant writers, and others who either partner with existing youth outreach programs or build them to account for broader impact initiatives. By the end of this session, participants will be able to identify factors for consideration when partnering with or developing youth outreach, more effectively partner with youth outreach programs using best practices and general rules of engagement, and execute the most essential priorities for longevity in youth outreach programs.

Children in racially segregated neighborhoods and/or communities with concentrated poverty are more likely to have poor indoor and outdoor air quality (Miranda et al., 2011; Wodtke et al, 2022) and poor-quality drinking water and sewage systems (Balazs, Morello-Frosch, Hubbard, & Ray, 2011; Balazs & Ray, 2014). Socially vulnerable groups, particularly African Americans, are more susceptible to climate change impacts such as extreme temperatures, air quality, and flooding (2021, EPA). Yet there is a persistent opportunity gap for students from minoritized communities to learn the science underlying the lived experience of environmental injustice. Deeply entrenched and pernicious environmental injustice and science educational opportunity gaps therefore motivate this work. For this study, I developed a pedagogical model informed by the socio-cognitive constructs of interest development (Renninger & Hidi, 2016) and place-based inquiry. In this study I tested the efficacy of a water quality themed curriculum using the water quality crises in Flint, Michigan as a case study. I tested the efficacy of this model using a quasi-experimental, within-group and between group comparison design aimed at addressing the following research questions:- Is this pedagogical model of geoscience teaching effective as determined by student knowledge gains pre, post, and delayed post?- Does this instructional approach of embedding geoscience content within a case of environmental injustice, lead to student interest development in the Earth sciences? If so, will these changes in student interest in the geosciences be measurable pre, post, and delayed post?Results of multivariate analyses indicate statistically significant and meaningful shifts in knowledge gains and interest. In this talk, I will present the theoretical foundations of the pedagogical model, the research design, findings, and implications of the work.

Non-acceptance of biological evolution is prevalent in U.S. adults, including in college students across all disciplines. Previous studies have shown that even among college biology majors, non-acceptance of evolution is highly correlated with the student religiosity, and primarily stems from the perception of conflict between concepts in biological evolution and religious teachings. Tackling perceptions of non-compatibility between religion and evolution is therefore key to increasing levels of evolution acceptance and consequently engagement of students in STEM field across diverse religious, ethnic, and racial identities. Instructors teaching evolution at religiously affiliated institutions of higher education may be uniquely situated to discuss and exemplify compatibility options between evolution and religion by being implicitly perceived as culturally in-group by religious students and therefore potentially more effective in influencing student attitudes. In this study, we aimed to measure student perceptions of instructor religiosity in courses involving evolution at a religiously affiliated university, and if/how these perceptions influence student attitudes. Our survey was distributed to students enrolled in Biology, Geology, and Teacher Education courses at a religiously affiliated university, and included instruments to measure degree of evolution acceptance (I-SEA), perception of conflict between religion and evolution (PCORE), and perceptions of instructor religiosity. We found no significant change in I-SEA nor PCORE scores between early and late semester respondents and generally high perception of instructors as religious among religious students. We found significant correlation between I-SEA and PCORE, but that neither was significantly correlated with perceptions of instructor religiosity. Our results suggest that student attitudes towards evolution are robust to both instruction on concepts and implicit perceptions of instructor religiosity in those courses. This suggests that instructors may need to take a more active role in tackling perceptions of conflict between religion and evolution in students to increase levels of evolution acceptance in their classrooms.

Over the 2021-2022 academic year, students enrolled in online (OL) sections of our Physical Geology laboratory course collectively averaged lower grades than their same-semester peers in face-to-face (F2F) sections, by nearly a full letter grade (~8%). With only minor variations in students' academic rank and demographics between delivery modes, we looked to differences in the curriculum materials between F2F and OL to inform this gap.Despite our best efforts to align the F2F and OL sections during the pandemic-related shift to online-only sections, they have parallel but not identical assessments of student learning. While the content and general flow of the labs are consistent between the course modalities, we modified the question styles (e.g. multiple choice, short answer, arithmetic), grading styles (e.g. auto-graded, number of attempts), and question weighting to reduce the cognitive load in an OL setting for students and graders. The labs that covered Streams, Groundwater, and Plate Tectonics content tended to have the highest grade disparity between F2F and OL sections over the entire academic year (~10-18%). However, labs with the greatest difference in scores varied between semesters. To address this, we made changes to our 2022-2023 academic year data collection, sub-dividing weekly lab assignments into 4-5 matched lab activities so that we could evaluate the influence of the content, specific activities, and curriculum material changes on student performance at a more discrete level. In this presentation, we will analyze two labs and the activities within them: one where the student performance gap was large between the two delivery modes and one where performance was nearly equivalent. Our analysis of the contrast between the results of these two labs informs our next steps for instructional interventions, but also holds general recommendations for curriculum development and improvement of online course materials.

There has been a global emphasis in developing the STEM workforce over the last several decades. Spatial thinking ability is a strong predictor of success in STEM (Wai et al., 2009; Shea et al., 2001). Spatial thinking involves a variety of specific spatial skills that incorporate a range of spatial concepts, different types of spatial representations, and transformations through time and space (NRC, 2006). Spatial thinking typically is not formally taught in STEM courses but is often assumed to either already exist in the minds of students when they are admitted into a program or intuitively develop as they progress through their coursework (Gold et al., 2018). Our investigation sought to characterize aspects of spatial thinking instruction in undergraduate geology courses and to measure how students' spatial skills evolved as they progressed through the geology curriculum. We collected over 175 hours of observational data from 6 courses across the undergraduate geology curriculum. We assessed students' spatial thinking performance via an aggregate spatial thinking skill pre- and post-test. We will describe the results from these two data strands and compare spatial thinking instruction (observations) to students' spatial thinking gains in individual undergraduate geology courses and across the curriculum. Preliminary analyses suggest that the gains in specific spatial thinking skills correspond with instruction that places an explicit or implicit emphasis on these skills. While this study focuses on spatial thinking in geology courses, the study design could be applied to assessing the incorporation of other skills in many disciplines.