Hide
The Teaching Quantitative Skills in the Geosciences website has not been significantly updated since 2011. We are preserving the web pages here because they still contain useful ideas and content. But be aware that the site may have out of date information.
You can find more recent and extensive resources on the Teach the Earth website.

Student Frame of Reference and Experience

Initial Publication Date: December 10, 2009

Students' Frame of Reference


Students are personally familiar with and can easily visualize:

  • Time periods in seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years (decades to centuries)
  • Horizontal distances ranging from a few fractions of an inch to feet, yards, and a few miles.
  • Vertical distances ranging from inches to a few tens of feet.
  • Volumes ranging from a few cups to quarts and gallons.
  • Rates from a few miles per hour up to about 70 miles per hour.
  • Discharges ranging from a few cups per second to a few gallons per minute (pumping gas, filling a glass or tub).
  • Densities ranging from less than one to about 2.7 g/cm3 (less than water to average rocks).

Students have difficulty visualizing (but commonly encounter in geoscience courses):

  • Time periods that are very short (fractions of a second) or very long (millions to billions of years).
  • Horizontal distances that are very small (fractions of a millimeter or smaller) or longer than a few 10s of kms (up to light years); and this is apart from the English-metric conversion issue!!
  • Vertical distances that are more than a few tens of feet (hundreds of meters to tens or hundreds of kilometers)
  • Volumes that are either very small (atomic) or larger than a bathtub (km3)
  • Rates that are very slow (e.g., 10-14/sec or 50 km/million years) or very fast (e.g., 7 km/sec)
  • Discharges that are large (e.g., 45,000 m3/sec)
  • Densities that are large (e.g., 5 g/cm3; 19 gm/cm3)

« Previous Page