SAGE Musings: Guided Pathways - A Challenge and an Opportunity For 2YC Geosciences

Guided Pathways is a national initiative/movement that has important implications for two-year college programs such as geoscience where students typically do not "discover" the discipline until they are enrolled in college. The initiative is intended to increase degree completion rates as well as reduce the number of "unused" credits students accumulate that are not required for the degrees they earn. One of the major goals of Guided Pathways is to provide students with a simplified sequence of courses to ensure that all of the courses they take will "count" toward their degree. However, moving between different pathways is typically difficult.

Regardless of what you think about Guided Pathways, this type of initiative is coming to many two-year colleges in response to multiple important forces, including the linking of retention and completion rates to funding in an effort to improve those rates. More

SAGE Musings: Lessons from Biology Education

The biological science education community has undergone considerable efforts to reform how science is taught, using evidence-based strategies to enable all students to be successful. One well-published practitioner is Dr. Kimberley Tanner at San Francisco State University. This Musing highlights some of her work that is pertinent to geoscience teaching. I encourage you to take a look at her publications and consider how to incorporate some of her suggestions into your teaching. More

SAGE Musings: Geoscience Career Skills

One of the three "strands" of the SAGE 2YC: Faculty as Change Agents project is facilitating students' professional pathways. Obviously, not every student will become a geoscientist, but we want to help those who do choose to pursue a geoscience career path. What does it mean to prepare our students to become geoscientists? Certainly one element is to make students aware of geoscience career options. Elizabeth Nagy-Shadman, one of the SAGE 2YC Change Agents, wrote about how she has students investigate geoscience careers in the March, 2018 edition of Foundations, NAGT's 2YC newsletter. Once students are aware of, and some are interested in, geoscience careers, we need to give them opportunities to build and strengthen the skills that geoscientists use. More

SAGE Musings: Student Memberships in Professional Organizations

Membership in a professional society is one way for students to get started on preparing for their careers in the geosciences. Membership in professional organizations can help students develop their identity as geoscientists, meet professional geoscientists, learn about the profession and about employment opportunities, attend talks, and participate in local or regional field trips. Many professional societies offer free or discounted memberships to students. In addition, some of these national organizations have state, local or even student chapters with local or regional meetings that are more accessible to geoscience students than distant national meetings. More

SAGE Musings: Student Perceptions of Geoscience Careers

Whether students choose to pursue a degree or career in geoscience - or even take classes in geoscience - is often influenced by their perceptions of geoscience careers. A recent study (Sherman-Morris and McNeal, 2016) found that "the geosciences scored lower than other science subjects with respect to student perceptions in its ability to help the environment, help society, help them find a job, and salary. This was true for each of the geoscience fields measured when compared with every other science, technology, engineering, and math fields measured with the exception of physics." Obviously, these perceptions make geoscience less appealing to many students. But are they accurate? Let's consider each of these perceptions. More

Comments (3)

SAGE Musings: 2YC Research Students' Experiences, in Their Own Words

The Community College Cultivation Cohort (C4) is a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF REU), sponsored by the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), an NSF Science and Technology Center located at the University of Southern California. C4 recruits community college students nationwide, focusing on students who are interested in pursuing a STEM career. Students participate in a 9-week research experience where they work in teams to identify and characterize a novel seafloor or subseafloor microbe. In addition to learning about research culture by being immersed in it, students attend weekly professional development sessions focused on succeeding at a 4-year institution and beyond. We asked this year's cohort to tell us about their experiences. Here are a selection of their answers. More

SAGE Musings: Summer Reading Recommendations

I like to take a break from many routines during the summer, and that includes taking a break from writing SAGE Musings blog posts. I also like to make more time for reading over the summer. I asked the project leaders for summer reading recommendations, and here they are.... Some are directly related to our SAGE 2YC project, while others are more generally related to geoscience. Perhaps you'll find something of interest in this list, as well. More

SAGE Musings: Geoscientist Biographical Sketches

When I was in college, the only career I imagined for myself was following in my parents' footsteps. I suspect I'm not the only one. How can we help our students - especially those whose parents aren't geoscientists - imagine themselves as future geoscientists? Of course, simply providing information about careers and career opportunities is a good place to start. The SAGE 2YC website has a set of pages of career information, and these are great resources for you and your students. But sometimes an example stimulates the imagination, particularly if a student finds the example easy to relate to -- just as it was easy for me to imagine doing what my parents did. This is where geoscientist biographical sketches, sometimes called "(geo)scientist spotlights," come in. More

SAGE Musings: Resources from InTeGrate

The InTeGrate project, funded by the National Science Foundation, "supports the teaching of geoscience in the context of societal issues both within geoscience courses and across the undergraduate curriculum." While the project's goal is "to develop a citizenry and workforce that can address environmental and resource issues facing our society," the curricular materials developed by this project also lend themselves to other important goals, including those of the SAGE 2YC project. That is, they can be used to support the academic success of all students, facilitate the professional pathways of geoscience students, and broaden participation in the geosciences. More

Comments (1)

SAGE Musings: Evidence-Based Strategies for Mitigating Stereotype Threat

I've written about stereotype threat before (see http://serc.carleton.edu/sage2yc/musings/stereotype_threat.html), but today I want to share some fascinating things I learned from reading Claude Steele's book, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (Norton & Co., 2010). I highly recommend reading this book. I found it both inspiring and riveting -- two words I don't usually use to describe books that I read for work.

First, just a brief reminder about what stereotype threat is and how it works: people who belong to an underrepresented group – in any setting – know if there is a stereotype that applies to them in that setting. Subconsciously, they worry about whether the stereotype is true for them. That subconscious worry uses some of their mental resources. That is, it distracts them from the task at hand, and that distraction decreases their performance. More