What's New @ SERC
Below, find a selection of new teaching materials found at SERC-hosted websites. Jump down to view more new and recently updated SERC-hosted resources.
Reviewed Collections ▼ Teaching Resources ▼ More Resources! ▼SERC Partnerships ▼What's coming from SERC ▼
Helpful Features on the SERC website!
SERC's
Favorites feature allows you to keep track of SERC pages you use frequently. Return to them easily and optionally get emailed when they are updated. You can even build and share collections of pages.
The Community Contribution Tool allows educators who use SERC-hosted activities to share their modifications and improvements back to the community. If you've made an existing activity even better for your students, let us all know what you did!
SERC now supports Digital Object Identifiers (DOI's). If you're citing a SERC-hosted resource you can now include a DOI in your citation. Learn more about this feature and our new support for ORCID's.
Reviewed Collections
SERC hosts several growing collections of reviewed materials - check out some of them below.
The CLEAN site includes more than 800 ready-to-use resources that have been reviewed by educators and scientists for elementary, secondary and higher education settings. The website features guidance for teaching about climate and energy, including Spanish-language versions and a series of webinars, which have been recorded for viewing at your convenience. In addition, guidance is given for culturally-relevant climate literacy teaching and climate mental health, as well as for creating your own NGSS-aligned units, utilizing CLEAN resources. The resources are complimented by the CLEAN Network: a professionally diverse community of climate literacy stakeholders who engage through an active email list.
The Exemplary Collection showcases the best online teaching activities relevant to NAGT's community of Earth educators as scored by peer review on scientific veracity; alignment of goals, activity, and assessment; pedagogical effectiveness; robustness; and completeness of the Activity Sheet. In 2022, we completed the review of the two-decade legacy of
On the Cutting Edge and the collection continues to grow each year as new activities are submitted and reviewed so check back regularly!
Explore peer-reviewed activities from the Teaching Computation Using MATLAB workshops. These activities showcase high-quality teaching with MATLAB. Check out the full exemplary collection and consider submitting your own MATLAB teaching activity for the next round of peer review. Descubre las actividades en Español del Taller Virtual para Educadores: Enseñando Pensamiento Computacional con MATLAB. Estas actividades, revisadas por pares, destacan por su calidad. ¡Consulta la colección y disfruta enseñando con MATLAB!
The Teach the Earth portal is an entry point for educators in the geosciences and related fields to find a broad array of teaching and learning resources. Consolidating thousands of resources from dozens of independent projects, this NAGT-managed hub provides Earth educators a "one-stop shop" where they can search multiple Earth Education websites for a specific course or activity or browse resources by topic, level, pedagogic strategy, and much more.
Teaching Resources
New Guidance on Finding Teaching Resources That Match your Needs
This brief guide highlights a set of proven strategies for effectively exploring SERC collections. From automated recommendations to our enhanced Favorites features, you'll learn how to get the most out of SERC sites.
Community Contribution Tool
Through a new
NSF-funded project we've developed a new 'Community Contribution Tool.' After initial testing at the 2024 Earth Educator's Rendezvous we have revised this tool and made it available on every SERC-hosted activity page. You can use it today by following the 'Used this activity' button near the top of every activity page. This tool provides a way for educators who've used SERC-hosted activities to share their experiences back with the community. Have you modified an activity, combined it with new data, or want to share how it played out with your students? With this new tool you can document and share those resources and experiences directly through the existing activity page. Community contributions will be displayed within the original activity page, allowing educators to learn from each other's real-world experiences.
This new site is a space where the geoscience education community can share our collective experience of how AI, and in particular generative AI, is impacting what and how we teach. The site currently provides some initial exploration of questions like: Can AI make my work as an educator easier? How do I guide my students in using AI appropriately and ethically? How is AI impacting geoscience as a discipline? If these issues are important to you, consider
signing up for updates about future events and resources.
Undergraduate majors in the Earth and environmental sciences also often struggle with effectively applying math in Earth science. This project,
The Math Your Earth Science Majors Need, is developing co-curricular modules to support majors-level students on math and statistics concepts relevant to majors-level courses. The math questions and practice problems are drawn from a variety of Earth sciences sub-disciplines, so students have the opportunity to use math within the scientific context on a range of applications. Math classes taken in math departments, while valuable, often fail to give students practice using math in their own subject area and students are often not able to effectively transfer the skills themselves.
The Teaching with Investigation and Design in Science (TIDeS) project supports faculty to develop and implement
curricular materials for introductory undergraduate science courses that focus on science investigation and engineering design. The aim of the project is to prepare future teachers by exposing them to discourse-filled, context-rich, inclusive classrooms on the premise that teachers should learn science the way they are expected to teach it. SERC is involved both through support of the rubric-driven curriculum development process and a multi-faceted evaluation making use of qualitative and quantitative methods to assess project objectives.
The Visible Geology web-based application, developed by Seequent, consists of intuitive 3D models with features that can provide scaffolded practice to strengthen geoscientific thinking skills. The teaching activities aim to reinforce fundamental skills of spatial reasoning and deciphering geologic histories, along with acting as a simplified model to supplement a larger field project. The activities are designed to only take about a day, and can be used for homework, lecture activities, and lab assignments.
More SERC-hosted resources
The EvaluateUR Method provides an online guided evaluation process designed for programs that support research experiences for undergraduates. EvaluateUR has variants for use in independent summer and academic-year research programs, course-based undergraduate programs, academic year and summer internship programs, and collegiate competitions. New this year is a free-to-use variant for students. EvaluateUR-Student Open Access takes the elements of the EvaluateUR Method and makes them available to individual students who want to engage in self-driven reflection and feedback on their research, competition, or internship programs.
SERC now hosts the PROmoting Geoscience, Research, Education and SuccesS (PROGRESS) Program website. Progress aims to mentor STEM undergraduates who identify as women interested in the Geosciences through a combination of formal and informal, professional and peer mentoring. Visit the PROGRESS website to find tools for implementing workshops for students, resources for individuals mentoring students, and resources for students about networking and research.
The Accelerating Systemic Change Network (ASCN) is a network of individuals and institutions, formed with the goal of more quickly advancing STEM education programs. This year, the ASCN website underwent a significant rebuild and reorganization to make finding resources and connecting with peers easier than ever. Resources were reorganized to put the most-used and highest impact materials from-and-center. Discoverability of resources through search was improved with new faceted search terms and an increased search scope. Working group pages are now easier to browse, and recent working group activities are highlighted.
Through a partnership with the
EarthScope Consortium (formerly UNAVCO), this site now reflects the current state of the art in Teaching about Geodesy: the science of accurately measuring the Earth's size, shape, orientation, mass distribution and how these vary with time. The site includes more than 100 teaching activities, videos and supporting resources. They span undergraduate and secondary audiences and include resources for both classroom and field courses. The site is an entry point to Geodesy materials from multiple SERC-hosted projects and includes undergraduate teaching activities previously held on the original UNAVCO site.
Following on the highly successful 2025 event, a second Innovations in Two-Year College STEM Education (ITYC) Summit will be held in the summer of 2027. Combining programming for new and experienced PIs at two-year colleges, the Summit and the associated webinar series will provide lots of opportunities for people on projects with ITYC funding to meet and learn from each other.
SERC's For Higher Ed portal has received a major update! The portal helps to contextualize resources produced by SERC-hosted projects to provide faculty, program leads, department chairs, and learning centers with ideas and materials that help improve teaching practice and strengthen programs and systems. For Higher Ed addresses topics such as implementing active pedagogies, facilitating career pathways, making and sustaining change, and many more!
SERC Partnerships
SERC serves as the external evaluator for the ARIS center. ARIS provides resources and professional development and supports communities and researchers in promoting positive societal impact of research. Two key efforts where SERC contributed as researchers or evaluators include the Rutgers ARIS Broader Impacts Toolkit and a Special Issue on the Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS) Broader Impacts Toolkit Project that documents case studies of institutional efforts to promote research impacts.
SERC applies a mixed-methods approach to the external evaluation of the NORDP Consultant Program. The Program partners cohorts of emerging research institutions (ERIs) are partnered with NORDP consultants in order to build and implement strategic and sustainable plans that grow institutional capacity for research. Given the unique assets and contexts of ERIs, the mixed-methods approach grounds the evaluation in the experiences of both the institutional partners and the consultants in order to characterize the unique journeys of the participants throughout the program, inform program leadership decision-making, and assess the overall program and its impact on all participants.
SERC serves as the external evaluators for the Polar STEAM project, which facilitates partnerships between educators, artists and writers and polar researchers through virtual and in-person experiences. SERC provides formative and summative evaluation of the center and of participant experiences.
As the external evaluators for the OOI Ocean Data Labs project, SERC helps project leaders understand the participant experience in professional development and authoring teaching modules; the broader teaching contexts in which instructors teach with Data Labs content (e.g. Lab manual, data explorations, OOI Nuggets, Python Notebooks), and the progress towards project goals.
SERC serves as the external evaluator for EPIIC which is an NSF program where three rounds of awarded consortia of institutions work as cross-institutional teams to drive key technologies and support innovation ecosystems that increase the institutions' capacity to grow external partnerships. SERC assesses the overall program across the awards and serves as the external evaluator for the NSF PI meetings.
SERC serves as the external evaluator for the MACH project which is a collaboration of thirteen university and institutional partners pursuing integrated, co-produced research. In addition to ongoing formative evaluation and thought partnership activities, our evaluation plan includes an annual Social Network Analysis, Principles Focused Evaluation, Workforce Development Plan Implementation Evaluation (assessing efforts to provide for the professional and career development needs of graduate students and post docs serving on the project's research team), and Broader Impacts Evaluation of the project's Community College and Documentary Film program activities. Learn more about MACH, including its publications.
A new collaboration between Emriver, maker of high-quality hydrologic models and SERC, your go-to source for pedagogical resources, has launched a dynamic new hub to collect, share, and expand teaching materials related to Emriver flumes and stream tables. Designed to support learners and educators from K–12 classrooms through graduate-level laboratories, STEM outreach programs, and conservation initiatives, the site brings together a growing collection of teaching activities developed by geoscience faculty and educators using Emriver models as well as pedagogic supports, a community discussion board, and professional development opportunities.
What's Coming from SERC
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