The 2018 Cleveland conference screened a documentary film titled "Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat and Started a Scientific Revolution." NAMTA conference participants enjoyed this memorable premier event in honor of Lynn Margulis, her symbiotic worldview, and her intimate community of scientific stars. This article is…

The next generation of professors will come from today's graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, but we do not know much about their preparation to use research-validated teaching practices. This study characterizes the teaching beliefs of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who represent future geoscience instructors though we…

A research gap exists with regard to the analysis of school children and adolescents' awareness on environmental issues. Current investigation analyzes data of 240 children and adolescents, aged between 8 and 14 years, within different school contexts in the mid-southern region of Brazil, on their knowledge level and moral judgment on solid…

A flurry of recent research in writing studies has addressed the need for more systematic approaches to graduate-level writing support, though more research is needed into more organic models that account for graduate students' specific needs and that build infrastructure for writing support within university departments. This article reports on a…

Glaciers and ice ages are important topics in teaching geomorphology, earth history, and climate change. As with many geoscience topics, glacier formation, glacier movement, glacial morphology, and ice ages consist of a wide variety of processes and phenomena. Accordingly, it must be decided which of those processes and phenomena should be part of…

Depending upon a cultural-historical perspective, where play is defined as the creation of an imaginary situation, this study seeks to examine whether and how family joint creation of imaginary situations can provide the conditions for a child's science learning in early childhood. The paper reported here forms part of a broader study, and the…

There is increasing emphasis on the importance of making Graduate Attributes (GAs) explicit to students as part of their degree programme and the role of students themselves in proactively developing GAs. The aim of the present project was to encourage students to actively develop and reflect upon curricular and extra-curricular attributes at an…

Internationally, there has been increasing emphasis on the teaching of the academic literacies, particularly reading and writing, in higher education institutions. However, recent research is highlighting the need for more explicit teaching of multimodal forms of communication, such as the visual literacies, in undergraduate courses in a wide…

Eighteen primary teachers across three conditions (Representational Fluency, Representational Agency, Comparison) received two days of training around an inquiry unit on plate tectonics replete with representations. The Representational Agency group also received training around the semiotic and material affordances of representations while the…

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine teacher instructional dilemmas and opportunities that emerged when students worked with interactive computer-based simulation models during the High-Adventure Science (HAS) project. The intervention included the HAS digital curriculum, designed for grades 7-12. Each curricular unit was framed to…

A series of short (5 to 7 minutes long) geoscience videos were created to support student learning in a flipped class setting for an introductory geology class at North Carolina State University. Videos were made using a stylus, tablet, microphone, and video editing software. Essentially, we narrate a slide, sketch a diagram, or explain a figure…

This research project represents the Status of Biodiversity and Its Conservation of Kobadak River basin of Maheshpur Upazila. The study was designed to develop a set of information about the present condition of biodiversity of the study area. Both primary and secondary data have been used to fulfill the survey successfully. Primary data have been…

In this paper I identify the components of "meaningful experiences" for participants on a wilderness river rafting journey. The research is phenomenologically informed, and includes interviews, journals, observations and follow-up emails from 32 participants on eight Franklin River (Tasmania) 10-day trips. It elicits individual…

The purpose of this study was to understand the factors that support the adoption of active learning teaching strategies in undergraduate courses by faculty members, specifically in the STEM disciplines related to geoscience. The focus of the study centered on the context of the department which was identified as a gap in evaluation and…

Technology and a variety of resources play an important role in students' educational lives. Vygotsky's (1987) theory of tool mediation suggests that cultural tools, such as computer software influence individuals' thinking and action. However, it is not completely understood how technology and other resources influence student action. Middle…