Any project that receives funds from the National Science Foundation must address two merit criteria: intellectual merit, the potential to advance knowledge, and broader impacts, the potential to benefit society (PAPPG-23-1). PIs of proposed projects often struggle, in particular, with developing their broader impacts plans. The NSF-funded Center for Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS) has developed an online toolkit, including a Broader Impacts (BI) rubric, for helping plan, develop, and assess the rigor of a BI plan. The BI rubric (https://aris.marine.rutgers.edu/rubric.php) includes 16 items for evaluating the potential of the BI plan for benefitting society and advancing social outcomes. The criteria address the target audience characteristics; the research, evidence-base, and originality of the plan; alignment to project objectives and NSF target outcomes; the expertise of the BI team; how well described are any partnerships; and whether there are adequate resources for infrastructure, evaluation, and carrying out the plan. Studies involving use of the BI rubric demonstrate strong interrater reliability and content validity across most of the criteria. Moreover, researchers have found it an easy to use and flexible tool in helping improve the competitiveness of their grant proposals. This presentation will introduce the online tools available for strengthening a BI plan, provide an overview specifically of the BI rubric, and demonstrate how its use could improve either plan development or implementation of a broader impacts and, in turn, strengthen its potential societal benefit.

In May 2023, we held a three-day workshop, Developing Expertise and Building Collaborations to Advance Atmospheric Science Education Research (ASER). The workshop was NSF funded with goals to address needs for professional development for those interested in formally pursuing ASER. We brought together five geoscience education research (GER) mentors with expertise in education research and 19 atmospheric science educators, including early career faculty and graduate students. We began the workshop with a dinner and keynote speaker who provided a perspective on the history of GER, shared lessons learned, gave suggestions for growing the community, and inspired us to pursue ASER. The days that followed included a gallery walk to identify shared research interests and develop research questions, structured training, mentoring, and networking. These activities brought workshop participants and mentors together to develop well-designed education research projects. Ultimately, the workshop participants organized into five research groups around common research interests. The GER mentors supported each research group with numerous resources (e.g., literature, websites, research planning worksheets) to guide their selection of research design and methods and plan recruiting, and institutional review board approval. The mentors remained available post-workshop as participants continued to meet and carry the projects forward. Notably the groups made five presentations of their ongoing work through oral talks at the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society in January 2024. This highly successful workshop resulted in a much-needed support system that will help to grow the ASER community's expertise in education research methods. The collaborations that developed during the workshop will set a foundation for robust investigations into teaching and learning in atmospheric science. In this presentation, we will describe the workshop proceedings, communicate current research interests, identify gaps in the literature, outline areas for future work, and share the exciting research that ASER scholars are currently pursuing.

Students (undergraduate & graduate) often find dynamics the most challenging course in their atmospheric sciences curricula. Traditionally the material is presented from a mathematical physics perspective, and student work comprises derivations and pencil-and-paper analytic problem sets. Over my three decades teaching this material, I have found that this approach is less and less successful in guiding students towards the important physical insights and predictive understanding.In response, I have developed a set of simple Python modules, implemented in the Google Colab platform, through which students can explore core concepts in atmospheric dynamics, such as balanced flow, potential vorticity, and wave propagation. In accompanying assignments, students, observe the modeled behavior, write code to diagnose key quantities, and make predictions of the outcomes of numerical experiments (for example, what happens if the Coriolis parameter is changed).Here I demonstrate one example, a simulation of the Rossby adjustment problem, and present associated assignments and assessments.I plan to disseminate these modules via GitHub and Teach the Earth, in the hope that other instructors will adopt and improve them, and that they will be brought into sufficiently wide use that their efficacy can be meaningfully evaluated.

These presentations will aim to support educators as they discover a new way to teach the standards through digital tools and content. The NASA Infinscope project, based out of Arizona State University, develops free NGSS-aligned classroom-ready content for K-16 instructors. These products utilize custom simulations and immersive virtual field trips to engage learners and cover a wide variety of Earth science based, interdisciplinary topics such as ocean acidification, the nitrogen cycle, mass extinction events, and more. In addition to ready-made content, NASA Infiniscope offers educators tools that enable the development of immersive virtual field trips and customized lessons that support choice-based learning and digital storytelling. Tour It is a free, user-friendly, virtual field trip tool that gives educators agency to create professional, locally relevant digital learning experiences. They can use virtual field trips to develop labs where learners can gather observations and data, field trips to immerse learners in the culture and community of a place, and even make an accessible digital version of an annual field trip for students who are unable to join or need additional time to process. The Simple Authoring Tool is an open-source digital platform currently in BETA for lesson development and delivery. Educators can create their own digital lessons and deploy them to their classes with or without a learning management system (LMS). From single lessons to units or courses, teachers can create a library of digital content that can be used at scale, increasing accessibility and differentiating resources. The use of student agency and formative feedback can fill knowledge gaps, re-teach essential content, and provide choice.This session will provide a brief overview of content available and demonstrations of the platform tools.

The Seismology Skill Building Workshop (SSBW) is a 14 week online, asynchronous course designed to develop undergraduate skills in seismology and scientific computing. The SSBW has been an important addition to the geoscience recruiting and up-skilling portfolio, enrolling ~800 students annually since 2020, with high percentages of marginalized students and non-geoscience majors. However, there is significant attrition as the course progresses, highlighting the need to identify participants at risk of abandoning to motivate persistence. Initially, we tested metrics based on student performance on assignments in the learning management system (LMS). Specifically, we measured trends leading up to abandonment for 3 metrics: 1) how long it took a student to finish an assignment (Duration), 2) the score a student received on an assignment (Score), and 3) when a student turned in an assignment relative to the date it was due (Days before Due). For all participants from 2020-2022 that completed at least 10 assignments, we measured trends by aligning on abandonment and then stacking the time series. We determined that the Days before Due metric had the largest correlation with student attrition, with students submitting assignments later as their abandonment grew closer. The Score metric showed a significant correlation as well, but the drop in score was strongest on the last assignment and still only dropped by less than 2%. These findings indicate that performance on assignments can be predictive, but more correlated variables would improve the forecasting. Our next step is to expand to different student metrics, such as the amount of time since a student's last interaction with course material, and the overall number of course interactions. Future work will also focus on positive interventions to improve student retention, for example adding in incentives, like bonuses or a daily interaction streak, to keep the student engaged in the course.

Incorporating virtual field education opportunities has enabled geoscience programs to offer fieldwork to students who may not otherwise be able to participate. Various terms have been ascribed to these virtual field opportunities, ranging significantly in interactivity, immersion, design, and content. While some terms describe the unique experiences within a particular virtual field opportunity, others have been used more broadly, encompassing multiple types of fieldwork and instructional design. As the field continues to grow, consolidating the terminology and providing meaningful definitions will reduce potential confusion and provide a framework for geoscience education research.We performed a literature analysis of publications on virtual field opportunities to determine underlying trends in terminology use, pedagogical framework, and design. The compiled dataset comprising 85 publications was coded based on fieldwork type, geographic type, delivery method, interaction, assessment implementation, environment type, and primary terminology. Similar terms describing virtual field opportunities were combined when possible, resulting in nine different terms and an 'other' category. We conducted a multiple correspondence analysis on the coded dataset, allowing for a simplified representation of the multidimensional dataset. Results show that opportunities incorporating active learning strategies and a delivery method facilitating independent work are associated with problem-solving fieldwork. Classification of these experiences would range from 'virtual field courses' to 'virtual field experiences' to 'virtual outcrops.' Opportunities that tended toward passive interaction were associated with observational field trips and had greater involvement between a student and facilitator during the experience, typically being classified as 'virtual field guides' or 'virtual globes.' 'Virtual field trip' was among the most broadly applied terms in the dataset, overlapping with multiple other virtual opportunities, thus indicating its potential as an all-inclusive classification for virtual field opportunities. We recommend an updated lexicon with clearly defined definitions that pertain to the user experience and pedagogical design within the opportunity.