Online courses can feel isolating and sometimes lack human connections that can motivate students. We developed a fully online geoscience course to build a 'Community of Inquiry' with attention to cognitive, social, and teaching presences. We ran the course using nearly identical materials for 8 semesters (recorded video lectures, labs,…

Promoting collaboration and discourse in asynchronous online courses is challenging; students need something engaging to talk about, a communications medium in which to fluidly discuss it, and a social environment that supports discourse. We designed a fully online introductory geoscience lecture and lab course called Geology Goes Hollywood that…

People with disabilities are chronically underrepresented in many geoscience departments across the country. There are a number of proposed reasons why this under-representation persists, one of which is lack of instructor training in designing accessible curriculum and making high-quality accommodations. This not only puts students with…

We compare student learning and perception data from astronomy, physics, and geology courses taught in a traditional classroom with individual desks to the same classes taught in a large auditorium. In a large student sample (1,593 students), there is no clear difference between rooms in measures of failure rates or average final grades. However,…

Most research about reformed teaching practices in the college science classroom is based on instructor self-report. This research describes what is happening in some introductory geology courses at multiple institutions across the country using external observers. These observations are quantified using the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol…

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…

There has been an increased emphasis for college instruction to incorporate more active and collaborative involvement of students in the learning process. These views have been asserted by The Association of American Colleges (AAC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and The National Research Counsel (NRC), which are advocating for the…

A modified form of problem-based learning (PBL) with problems based on real workplace scenarios was trialled in a third year university class on Environmental Geology. Problems were developed in consultation with industry and based on their recent projects. These were then modified to allow for the shorter timeframe available, the less developed…

Calibrated Peer Review™ (CPR), a web-based instructional tool developed as part of the National Science Foundation reform initiatives in undergraduate science education, allows instructors to incorporate multiple writing assignments in large courses without overwhelming the instructor. This study reports successful implementation of CPR in a…

The study reported here concludes that the laboratory does help students in their geology lecture course work even though the content emphases are different. (MDR)

Self-paced and lecture versions of a general geology course were taught by the same instructor using identical exams and nearly identical instructional materials. No significant differences were found in apparent scholastic abilities, exam results, or levels of satisfaction with the course. Enrollment was notably higher in the lecture version.…

Compared are two approaches to inservice geology instruction for elementary and secondary school earth science teachers. The benefits of the combination of lecture, laboratory, and field work are emphasized. (CW)