Despite concerted efforts aimed at improving gender diversity in the discipline, the underrepresentation of women continues to persist in the geoscience domain. Research suggests that successful completion of introductory undergraduate STEM coursework is pivotal to the retention of students in STEM major programs and that spatial skills are…

With the growing popularity of Virtual Reality (VR), the integration of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework provides insights into its role in facilitating student learning in VR environments. VR offers immersive experiences and visualization of abstract concepts. However, the abundance of information in VR can be overwhelming without proper…

Newly appointed lecturers joining teaching-focussed environments can encounter significant challenges to sustain a successful research career. Some of these challenges pertain to the existing work culture and the suitability of mentoring. At the same time, success in academia is typically associated with the "academic super-hero" model…

'A lack of prior knowledge in the other discipline' is often given by geoscience instructors to explain why students struggle to apply knowledge from other disciplines to the Earth. We examine this assumption by considering the disciplinary crossing of buoyancy (physics) to isostasy (geoscience). We investigate the teachers' perspective through…

The anomalous thermal expansion of water in the 0 °C-4 °C range is extremely important to life on Earth, but it is normally not presented experimentally in educational settings. This paper presents a simple experiment to explore the anomalous thermal expansion of water in the 0 °C-4 °C range and the heat exchange processes in natural bodies of…

I had been sitting in a coffee shop in Reykjavik, Iceland, cycling through my photographs of the aurora borealis from the night before in Njardvik, when a man at the next table struck up a conversation. Recognizing his familial ties to the location in my photographs, he began to share stories that his grandfather told him as a child regarding the…

The geoscience education research (GER) community has produced a collaborative research framework that summarizes guiding questions for future research to inform and improve undergraduate geoscience teaching and learning. The GER Framework (St. John [Ed.], 2018a) was developed through an iterative process involving multiple stages of community…

Constructing explanations of scientific phenomena is a high-leverage practice that promotes student understanding. In the context of this study, we acknowledge that children are used to receiving explanations from teachers. However, they are rarely encouraged to construct explanations about the causes and consequences of phenomena. We modified a…

The applicability of Indigenous ethics to the evaluation of ecological restoration is explored through two case examples involving the Indigenous Sámi rivers of Näätämö and Ponoi in the European North. Six key restoration approaches are described that would have been overlooked had it not been for the use of Indigenous ethics from the start of the…

This chapter addresses the engagement of geoscience societies with community college faculty, traces the emergence of the Geo2YC Division as a model for others, and provides examples that focus on ways to build a professional community.

This paper describes how plate tectonics and rock genesis, two topics that are typically addressed separately in secondary Earth science classes, can be taught together as an integrated system. We define the TecRocks Reasoning Framework, developed to support student reasoning about rock formation situated in the context of plate tectonics. We also…

Natural selection is a fundamental scientific process, yet students and educators alike demonstrate misconceptions of the process. Though images are used often in science to facilitate learning, it is less common to assess learners' understanding through their own drawings. This study utilizes a multiple-choice assessment of evolutionary processes…

An important challenge for the geoscience community is developing engaging, accessible, and effective experiences within introductory courses, which are often gateways to geoscience majors. This study evaluates low-barrier-to-entry and flexible assignments focused on a pedagogical innovation: faculty replaced one of their usual course components…

Topographic maps are a common form of 3D surface elevation data represented as a 2D display. Despite their use in geoscience courses, many students find learning to effectively read and interpret these maps challenging. Here, we present a tool for teaching topographic map interpretation using 3D printed terrain. The terrain was 3D printed from a…

Inspired by a theoretical view of knowledge as a resource, this study explored in detail how a student used knowledge as a resource when she engaged in problem-solving about rocks and what she learned as a result of the practice of solving scientific problems. The context of the study was an inquiry project conducted in an earth science course for…