Concept inventories have been determined to be useful assessment tools for evaluating students' knowledge, particularly in the sciences. However, these assessment tools must be validated to reflect as accurately as possible students' understanding of concepts. One possible threat to this validation is what previous literature calls the item order…

Coupling the study of sustainability with geoscience may enable students to explore science in a more sophisticated way by examining the social-technological-ecological relationships that exist between human-nonhuman and flora-fauna-land interactions. Elementary educators are a population capable of making these issues come to life for today's…

According to the national survey of science education, science educators in the USA currently face many challenges such as lack of qualified secondary Earth and Space Science (ESS) teachers. Less qualified teachers may have difficulty teaching ESS because of a lack of conceptual understanding, which leads to diminished confidence in content…

Traditionally, there has been a large gap between the scientific and educational communities in terms of communication, which hinders the transfer of new scientific knowledge to teachers and students and the understanding of each other's needs and capabilities. In this paper, we describe a workshop model we have developed to facilitate…

We present a mixed-methods approach to community-based assessment design that engages tribal college and university faculty, students, and science educators, as well as experts in cultural knowledge from the Blackfeet and Diné (Navajo) nations. Information from cultural experts, gathered through a combination of sequential surveys and focus group…

To say Earth systems are complex, is not the same as saying they are a complex system. A complex system, in the technical sense, is a group of -agents (individual interacting units, like birds in a flock, sand grains in a ripple, or individual units of friction along a fault zone), existing far from equilibrium, interacting through positive and…