Geological skills such as interpreting outcrops are often taught during fieldwork. However, recent advancements in digital technologies and the demand for more inclusive and accessible learning has provided an opportunity to teach these skills in virtual field trips (VFT). The Iceland VFT was developed to teach students about volcanic features and…

Spatial thinking skills are crucial for success in any of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) domains, and they are malleable. One approach to support the development of student spatial skills is through the use of innovative technologies, like the augmented reality (AR) sandbox, that can also effectively teach geoscience…

Question-asking is a necessary step towards formulating hypotheses, making decisions, and solving problems, and is Practice #1 in the Next Generation Science Standards. To improve question-asking, educators and researchers need a way to categorize and evaluate students' questions, so as to judge whether an intervention has been effective. We…

Spatial skills are embedded in all aspects of the geosciences. The teaching and learning of spatial skills has been a challenging, but vital, endeavor. To support student learning of spatial skills in undergraduate courses, we designed scaffolds for spatially dependent content in a mid-level geoscience course using playdough to allow students to…

A survey with nine meteorological charts, maps, and images from a 2015 significant weather event was administered to meteorologists (N = 93) to identify which spatial thinking skills they report using with each chart, map, and image. Results reveal high reported use of mental animation (74.6%), disembedding (72.4%), and perspective taking (71.6%)…

The oft-repeated phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" supposes that an image can replace a profusion of words to more easily express complex ideas. For scientific visualizations that represent profusions of numerical data, however, an untranslated academic visualization suffers the same pitfalls untranslated jargon does. Previous…

The augmented reality (AR) sandbox bridges the gap between two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) visualization by projecting a digital topographic map onto a sandbox landscape. As the landscape is altered, the map dynamically adjusts, providing an opportunity to discover how to read topographic maps. We tested the hypothesis that the AR…

Spatial visualization is an essential prerequisite for understanding geological features at all scales, such as the atomic structures of minerals, the geometry of a complex fault system, or the architecture of sedimentary deposits. Undergraduate geoscience majors bring a range of spatial skill levels to upper-level courses. Fortunately, spatial…

Three-dimensional thinking skills are extremely useful for geoscientists, and at the undergraduate level, these skills are often emphasized in structural geology courses. Google Earth is a powerful tool for visualizing the three-dimensional nature of data collected on the surface of Earth. The results of a 5 y pre- and posttest study of the…

The scale of features shown on outcrop photographs can be critical to geoscience interpretations, yet little is known about how well individuals estimate scale in images. This study utilizes a visualization test in which participants were asked to estimate the absolute size of several boxes shown in outcrop images using high resolution, stitched…

Spatial thinking skills are critical to success in many subdisciplines of the geosciences. We tested students' spatial skills in geoscience courses at three institutions (a public research university, a comprehensive university, and a liberal arts college, all in the midwest) over a two-year period. We administered standard psychometric tests of…

We investigated the effect of modeling and visualization resources on upper-division, undergraduate and graduate students' performance on an open-ended assessment of their understanding of physical hydrology. The students were enrolled in one of five sections of a physical hydrology course. In two of the sections, students completed homework…

Authentic scientific data, when richly contextualized, can provide the basis for compelling learning experiences. Many undergraduate students either do not have access to primary data, or if they do, the data are so abstract that student engagement is limited. Here, we describe contextual information and data-rich, student-centered activities we…

Cognitive science research shows that the brain has two systems for processing visual information, one specialized for spatial information such as position, orientation, and trajectory, and the other specialized for information used to identify objects, such as color, shape and texture. Some individuals seem to be more facile with the spatial…

Geology education usually takes place within the context of a broader curriculum, but specific synergies between disciplines have rarely been explored or exploited. Here, we have assessed the spatial visualization skills of undergraduate students in a variety of disciplines to determine which are most compatible with a geology curriculum. Spatial…