For an inquiry-based alternative to lectures and recall tests, I encouraged learners to become "geotourists"; that is, learners researched and developed a geologic guidebook to a United States National Park of their choice. Over the course of a semester, students wrote chapters on plate tectonics, the rock cycle, geologic history,…

The International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) is a worldwide, annual competition for secondary school students. This is our solution to problem number 10, "The Kaye effect", as presented in the final round of the 21st IYPT in Trogir, Croatia. The Kaye effect occurs when a thin stream of shampoo or a different adequate non-Newtonian liquid…

The Professional Standards Project (PSP) is a nationally coordinated professional learning program for languages teachers, to improve the quality of languages teaching and, thereby, improve student learning. It is based on the use of the "Professional standards for accomplished teaching of languages and cultures" (hereafter, "the…

This article reports the attitudes of students towards mathematics after they had participated in an applied mathematical modelling project that was part of an Applied Mathematics course. The students were majoring in Earth Science at the National Taiwan Normal University. Twenty-six students took part in the project. It was the first time a…

This paper compares and contrasts the impacts of three professional development designs aimed at middle school Earth science teachers on how teachers plan and enact instruction. The designs were similar in their alignment to research-based practices in science professional development: each design was of an extended duration and time span,…

Current high school Earth Science curricula and textbooks organize scientific content into isolated "units" of knowledge. Within this structure, content is taught, but in the absence of the context of fundamental understandings or the process of how the science was actually done to reach the conclusions. These are two key facets of scientific…

As the research interests and the focus of traditional earth scientists are transformed, so too must education in earth system science at colleges and universities across the country change. The required change involves not only the methods used to teach this new science, but also the essential place of the earth sciences in the panoply of…

In a time of expensive energy and concerns about climate change, land may be a major asset for colleges, providing a vastly different opportunity than it did in the past, when it was merely a place to set down new buildings, new campuses, or research parks. Since new alternative-energy technologies like wind and solar demand a lot of land--along…

A globe, in a school or university yard, which simulates the Earth's orientation in space, could be a very useful and helpful device for teaching physics, geometry, astronomy and the history of science. It would be very useful for science education to utilize the forthcoming International Year of the Planet Earth 2008 and the International Year of…

We surveyed the use of Great Lakes online learning materials by a sample of K-8 teachers. Analyses tested for correlation of use with 1) whether teachers learned about the resources in pre- or in-service education, 2) geographical significance, and 3) whether teachers taught about the topics emphasized in the online learning materials. We compared…

To promote and expand geoscience literacy in the United States, meaningful partnerships between research scientists and educators must be developed and sustained. For two years, science and education faculty from an urban research university and secondary science teachers from a large urban school district have prepared 11th and 12th grade…

Recent research has challenged traditional assumptions that scientific practice and knowledge are essentially individual accomplishments, highlighting instead the social nature of scientific practices, and the co-construction of scientific knowledge. Similarly, new research paradigms for studying learning go beyond focusing on what is "in the…

To motivate student learning, the affective domain--emotion, attitude, and motivation--must be engaged. We propose a model that is specific to the geosciences with theoretical components of motivation and emotion from the field of educational psychology, and a term we are proposing, "connections with Earth" based on research in the…

The Paleo Exploration Project was a professional development program for K-12 teachers from rural eastern Montana. The curriculum was designed to incorporate geospatial technologies, including Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and total station laser surveying, with authentic field experiences in geology and…

This study investigated the relationship between the use of a three-dimensional Virtual Reality Learning Environment for Field Trip (3DVLE[subscript (ft)]) system and the achievement levels of senior high school earth science students. The 3DVLE[subscript (ft)] system was presented in two separate formats: Teacher Demonstrated Based and Student…