Initial Publication Date: October 16, 2017
Geoscientific Thinking and Geoscience Majors
This webpage draws on discussion by participants at the 2012 Teaching the Methods of Geoscience Workshop to support faculty in developing students' geoscientific thinking skills. You can browse the entire collection of activities, courses and essays from this workshop.
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Geoscience majors need to be able to apply geoscientific thinking to ask and solve questions on their own. When geoscientific thinking is embedded programmatically across the courses that make up the core of the major, students gain opportunities to think like and become part of a community of geoscientists. When determining how and when to address different aspects of geoscientific thinking, it is important to consider using tools appropriately for the problem under study, the developmental level of the students, and the sequencing of information across the program.
See example activities that explicitly incorporate geoscientific thinking for students majoring in the geosciences
- In his activity titled, Think-Aloud Modeling of Geologic Reasoning in the Field, Steve Reynolds, Arizona State University, encourages students to think aloud as they reason through a problem.
- Scott Linneman, Western Washington University, gives students experiences that allow them to develop intuition about uncertainty in Accuracy, Precision, and Topographic data.
- In his activity titled, Discovering the principles of relative age dating, James Ebert, State University of New York, College at Oneonta, gives students the opportunity to derive general principles or laws on their own from geoscientific evidence.
Read essays on teaching geoscientific thinking to geoscience majors
- Cindy Shellito, University of Northern Colorado, describes how she integrates geoscientific thinking by using data and modeling in the essay titled: Developing a hands-on approach to collecting, analyzing, and interpreting weather observations and climate data.
- In an essay titled: A metacognitive approach to teaching geologic reasoning, Steve Reynolds, Arizona State University, describes how metacognition is used throughout his courses to reinforce geoscientific thinking.
- Dave Mogk, Montana State University, uses a historical approach to teaching mineralogy as described in his essay titled: Teaching the methods of geoscience in a mineralogy class.
Explore course descriptions that address geoscientific thinking for majors in the geosciences
- In her course description titled Geoscience Fundamentals, Barbara Bekken, Virginia Tech, describes how her use of a scaffolded research project makes the philosophies, methods, and communication required in geoscientific thinking explicit.
- In his course titled, Using Geophysical Field Studies as the Focus for Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in an Introductory Geophysics Course, Paul Kelso, Lake Superior State University, focuses on having students practice the role of a geophysicist while learning geophysics.
- Scott Linneman, Western Washington University, focuses on teaching through skills as opposed to content in his course titled, Geomorphology.
- Field-based research projects are the heart of a course titled, Sedimentary Geology, by James Ebert, State University of New York, College at Oneonta.
- Read more about curriculum design and how to integrate skills throughout a geoscience program.
- Read more about teaching about rates and time, including developing learning goals and assessments.
- Read more about teaching spatial thinking in the geosciences.