More than a half century has passed since the first integration of problem-based learning (PBL) in higher education teaching. Despite the extensive investigation focused on this pedagogy, rigorous research on the impact of PBL in civil engineering is limited. Thus, this study aims to provide a thorough evaluation of students' perceptions of PBL in…

The geoscience community has begun to grapple with the whiteness of the community and the harm and erasure of Indigenous communities done by earth and environmental scientists. We have come to understand that to recruit and retain Indigenous students, geoscience education needs to be culturally responsive by explicitly centering Indigenous…

Spatial skills, which represent the ability to mentally manipulate objects (Schneider & McGrew, 2012; Atit et al., 2020) have been shown to be correlated with entrance, persistence and success in STEM (Shea et al., 2001; Wai et al., 2009). Specifically, these skills have been shown to be necessary to geologists and geoscientists (Hegarty,…

One of the important roles of HE institutions is to train graduates who will smoothly enter the labour market. The literature review demonstrates that one effective method to facilitate this transition is to ensure students acquire professional experience. The aim was to establish the scale and characteristics of employers' demand for work…

The National Council for Geographic Education GeoCamp Iceland is a unique field experience designed to energize, inspire, and edify experienced and novice geography teachers. The 2015 institute (nineteen participants from fourteen states) was designed for K-12 educators and in 2017 (twenty-one participants from eighteen states and Washington, DC)…

A university geology department partnered with a STEM-focused high school to introduce project-based learning-centered geoscience content at the ninth-grade level. We hypothesized that these students, already interested in science, would be a natural recruitment pool into geoscience. Because they are enrolled by lottery, their demographics match…

Over the last three decades, scientists have uncovered the extent of human impacts on the earth's operating systems with increasing clarity and precision. These findings have prompted scientific claims that we have transitioned out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene epoch in the earth's geological history (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). At…

Science is a core discipline in academia yet the focus of most undergraduate technical writing is generally on the data and results, not the literature review. The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) librarian and a new geology professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) collaborated to develop an information literacy…

The timing and processes of development of the high topography and high relief of the southern Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico has been controversial for over a hundred years. This study applies several different methodologies towards understanding the timing and relative importance of the events that uplifted and shaped the…

Knowing an individual's geographic affiliation may be useful in evaluating a student's previous knowledge. To test this hypothesis, students in an online master's program were given presurveys to evaluate their previous knowledge in meteorology and geology, as well as geological and meteorological sense-of-place surveys.

This paper presents an instructional strategy for engaging students with the critical exploration of values in introductory geoscience courses. It is argued that the consideration of values (i.e., abstract expressions of desirable qualities such as cooperation, security, curiosity, and honesty) is an integral part of scientific practice and…

Most timeline analogies of geologic and evolutionary time are fundamentally flawed. They trade off the problem of grasping very long times for the problem of grasping very short distances. The result is an understanding of relative time with little comprehension of absolute time. Earlier work has shown that the distances most easily understood by…

Graduate students entered our online classrooms with robust, but nonscientific, opinions on climate change. To expose students to critical analysis of media and emphasize the nature of science, we required them to access scientific reports and participate in mandatory peer discussions. An introductory survey probed incoming knowledge and opinions,…

An understanding of geologic time is comprised of 2 facets. Events in Earth's history can be placed in relative and absolute temporal succession on a vast timescale. Rates of geologic processes vary widely, and some occur over time periods well outside human experience. Several factors likely contribute to an understanding of geologic time, one of…

We investigated connections between the natural and the cultural history of the Flathead Indian Reservation through the integration of geoscience, traditional tribal knowledge, and oral narratives for the purpose of improving Earth Science education in the tribal community. The project served as an avenue for the incorporation of indigenous…