Terms of Use part of Earth and Mind
The Editors hope that you will enjoy Earth & Mind, and find insights that you can use in your profession or daily life. If you do use an idea from Earth & Mind in your work, you must cite it. For most ...

Earth and Mind part of Earth and Mind
The mission of the Earth & Mind blog is to facilitate discussion and discovery about how humans think and learn about the Earth and environment. Earth & Mind explores the intersection between Geosciences, Education and Cognitive Sciences.

About Us part of Earth and Mind
Kim Kastens is a Doherty Senior Research Scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory ( This site may be offline. ) of Columbia University. Her training and early career were in marine geology, but in recent ...

Educating for "Sapience" part of Earth and Mind:Posts
George Mobus has proposed that an underlying reason for humanity's inability to seriously tackle complex, large-scale, long-lead-time problems like global climate change is a lack of "sapience" in ...

"What DOES poison oak look like?" part of Earth and Mind:Posts
The current iPhone4 advertisement has a photograph of poison ivy labelled as poison oak, which Kim sees as evidence of the feeble state of natural history education in America.

"Some Students Will..." part of Earth and Mind:Posts
Author asks herself and readers whether it is OK to write learning objectives that begin "Some students will...", acknowledging up front that the lesson has subtleties that not every student is going to ...

Turning Nature Into Categories part of Earth and Mind:Posts
Humans have developed many clever instruments for making numerical measurements of various aspects of nature, such as air temperature or wind velocity. However, in some circumstances, we take these carefully ...

Rocks as Models part of Earth and Mind:Posts
The rock samples typically used in teaching high school and intro level college Earth Science have been severed from their formative context. Rather than being presented as recorders of a specific set of earth ...

Embedded Energy versus Embedded Cognition part of Earth and Mind:Posts
A human-made object includes both embedded energy (the energy that was used to grow, mine, manufacture, and transport the object) and embedded cognition (the thinking that was used to design the artifact.)

Does "form follows function" apply in geosciences? part of Earth and Mind:Posts
The aphorism "form follows function" applies fairly straightforwardly to objects designed by humans and to organismal parts derived by evolution, but its applicability to geoscience objects is less ...