Earth Science in the News Investigation
Alex Lechler, Pacific Lutheran University
This is a writing assignment intended to get to students to think about the relevance of Earth Science to their everyday lives. Students are asked to read a short news article, selecting 1 of 3 articles provided as ...

Assessing the Impact of Ocean Acidification on Reef Building Corals
Elizabeth Crook, University of California-Irvine
This activity introduces students to an actual data set that explores the impacts of ocean acidification on tropical coral reef ecosystems. Students are first given a scenario for a field site in the Caribbean and ...

Global Patterns
Federica Raia, The City College of New York
Based on my research on how best to enhance students' understanding of complex systems, I utilize various activities to support pattern recognition, a fundamental skill to understanding complex systems ...

Discovering New Worlds
Dora Kastel, New Visions for Public Schools
This resource is a set of student and teacher materials for a new NGSS-driven Earth & Space Science (ESS) unit (4-6 weeks of instruction). The anchor phenomenon students are exploring through modeling and data ...

Using a collected rock, ROCKD, and MacroStrat off campus to hook students into introductory geology coursework on campus
David Sunderlin, Lafayette College
This activity asks students who are soon to enter an introductory geology course at the college level to collect a local rock from their home, vacation locale, or elsewhere prior to the course start date and do a ...

Geologic Mapping Exercise
Andrew Smith, Warrick County Soil and Water Conservation District/Crane Environmental Services llc
This exercise is designed to simulate some of the mapping aspects of a basic geological investigation. This mock geological investigation is a good wrap-up exercise because it incorporates a variety of geological ...

Is that true?
Steve Hovan, Indiana University of Pennsylvania-Main Campus
Ask students to research the "truth" behind statements from recent news articles and provide their opinion about what is "true". These assignments can be done as often as the instructor feels ...

Finding and predicting hurricane activity through GIS
Jennifer Gebelein, Florida International University
Students must be able to search for, find, download, display, query and map hurricane and other relevant GIS data. Hurricane data spans 1851-2008 and is from: http://www.fgdl.org/metadataexplorer/explorer.jsp ...

Geology Around The World
Christy Visaggi, Georgia State University
This is a short writing assignment given in the second semester of an introductory geology course. Students are encouraged to come up with ideas for places around the world that they wish to investigate with ...

Effectively engaging with climate skeptics
Jessica Kleiss, Lewis & Clark College
One of my persistent challenges as a climate scientist involves friendly conversations with my extended (climate skeptic) family over the Thanksgiving table, as I try to inform and guide their perceptions about ...