Student Frame of Reference and Experience

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)