The mineral identification lab is typically the entry level college student's initial hands-on introduction to minerals. Our research focused on identifying alternative mineralogy conceptions that students bring to an introductory geology course and investigating the origins and nature of these conceptions. We identified a number of alternative…

This paper reports on a service-learning component introduced in an upper-level undergraduate geology course. Students identified rock types used by a local countertop manufacturing company and made fliers describing their mode of formation. Students then completed a final rock identification exam. To assess the effect of participating in the…

This study presents a practical developed for an undergraduate geotechnical engineering course. The practical was designed to reduce systematic issues so that students could focus on cognitive and conceptual issues rather than practical minutiae. Compression tests were carried out on dry halite, enabling consistent specimen densities to be…

A novel learning intervention has been developed and tested in which honor's level Earth science students were tasked with conducting interviews with established geologists working in the Southern African minerals sector. The task was designed using Laurillard's conversational framework as a theoretical underpinning, which offers an iterative and…

The Mineralogy Concept Inventory (MCI) is a statistically validated 18-question assessment that can be used to measure learning gains in introductory mineralogy courses. Development of the MCI was an iterative process involving expert consultation, student interviews, assessment deployment, and statistical analysis. Experts at the two universities…

Improvisational or "improv" theater is a live form where the elements of a scene are made up during the performance. Research in various academic disciplines has found the use of improv in classrooms beneficial. However, there is no such literature of use in the geosciences. Presented here are the results from two semesters of nearly…

A plan for national education to train outstanding engineers has been put into practice at Henan Polytechnic University (HPU). Practical education is a basic characteristic of engineering education. This paper proposed ideas and models to reform the mineral processing engineering education system and also described the discipline and the objective…

The objective of this study is to use personal analogy as a pre-organizer. The subject of the personal analogy is chosen as minerals. For this purpose, geography teacher candidates were asked the questions, "Which mineral would you like to be? Why?" They explain the properties of the minerals by matching them with their own…

General chemistry and introductory chemistry students were presented with a laboratory exploration for the determination of the mass percent of copper in rock and mineral samples. They worked independently in the laboratory, which involved multiple lab (pipetting, preparing standard solutions by quantitative dilution, recording visible spectra…

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…

Ancient cultures or civilizations carried out different technological improvements without the knowledge of the scientific processes involved. At the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona (ETSEIB), some courses deal with the technological achievements in the antiquity and, in particular, one course deals with the…

The introductory physical geology laboratory courses taught at North Carolina State University aims to promote scientific thinking and learning through the use of scientific inquiry-based activities. A rubric describing five possible levels of inquiry was applied to characterize the laboratory activities in the course. Two rock and mineral…

A laboratory experiment is described in which a simple characterization of a historical lime mortar is made by the determination of its approximate composition by a gravimetric method. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction (XRD) are also used for the qualitative characterization of the lime mortar components. These…

This paper organizes and analyses over 500 geoscience misconceptions relating to earthquakes, earth structure, geologic resources, glaciers, historical geology, karst (limestone terrains), plate tectonics, rivers, rocks and minerals, soils, volcanoes, and weathering and erosion. Journal and reliable web resources were reviewed to discover (1) the…

This mixed-method research attempted to clarify the role of visuospatial abilities in learning about mineralogy. Various sources of data--including quantitative pre- and postmeasures of spatial visualization and spatial orientation tests and achievement scores on six measures and qualitative unstructured observations, interviews, and field trip…