July 15-17, 2004
Carleton College, Northfield, MN

By Invitation Only

This workshop will bring together a small group of faculty to create resources for teaching quantitative skills in the geosciences that can be broadly disseminated via the web. Our goal is to provide an environment in which you can refine an assignment or lab activity that you use in teaching upper division students, create supporting materials that will help other faculty use your activity, and put all of these materials onto the web as part of the Teaching Quantitative Skills in the Geosciences site .

To make the workshop a highly productive time resulting in useable resources, we ask that each participant come to Carleton with a lab or assignment that they use in teaching quantitative skills to upper level geoscience students and that they think is suitable for broad use by faculty. We hope that this activity will demonstrate how you either work with students to understand and use equations, or to understand and use mathematical models.

During the 3 day meeting at Carleton we will

  • provide an opportunity for you to discuss your activity with other geoscientists and mathematicians as well as to critique their activities
  • provide time to revise the activity and make a web-accessible version with supporting materials for faculty
  • work together to develop a set of overarching resources about teaching with equations and teaching with models
  • design complementary activities suitable for introductory courses that initiate development of the skills needed to succeed in the upper division courses.

We are pleased to have Sam Patterson from the Carleton mathematics department as one of the workshop leaders. Sam has been very active at Carleton in thinking carefully about the relationships between science and math and how to best capitalize on their respective strengths in teaching quantitative skills. He will be a valuable resource as we critique and refine our activities as well as for the development of supporting materials for the site.

The workshop will provide an unusual opportunity to focus on how we teach quantitative skills to our majors and will result in a peer-reviewed web publication for you. We hope you are excited by this opportunity and available to attend. The workshop is by invitation only. This opportunity is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants DUE 0083251 and DUE 0085600. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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