Page 9 - i1052-5173-29-10

in-class activities can provide more fre- information in real time with their peers REFERENCES CITED
quent and better opportunities to assess the leads to better understanding and is worth AGI, 2016, Geoscience for America’s Critical
extent to which students are effectively the class time devoted to it. Needs: Washington, D.C., American
making use of the practices. Geosciences Institute, https://www.american
geosciences.org/policy/critical-needs (last
CONCLUSIONS accessed 18 Apr. 2019).
Teamwork, Collaboration, and Discourse The importance of Earth science to American Chemical Society Committee on
Rearranging topics to take an Earth- societal issues is embedded in the NGSS, Professional Training (ACS-CPT), 2015, ACS
systems approach, including more con- which have been widely adopted across the Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures for
nections to human activity and society, United States, and the performance expec- Bachelor’s Degree Programs: Washington,
D.C., American Chemical Society, 38 p.,
and engaging students in working with tations set ambitious goals for students— https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/
data will not alone produce the kind of and their teachers. As geoscientists, we about/governance/committees/training/2015
changes envisioned in the Framework. teach students who go on to a variety of -acs-guidelines-for-bachelors-degree
As noted by Windschitl and Calabrese careers, including K–12 teaching, and we -programs.pdf (last accessed 18 Apr. 2019).
Barton (2016), “It would be difficult to must adapt our courses to prepare them. Banilower, E.R., Smith, P.S., Weiss, I.R.,
Malzahn, K.A., Campbell, K.M., and Weis,
overstate the importance that discourse is Although our classes have become more A.M., 2013, Report of the 2012 national survey
now recognized to play in all aspects of active and student-centered over the past of science and mathematics education:
science instruction” (p. 1128). Discourse fifteen years, we have been slow to take a Horizon Research Inc., 309 p., http://
involves eliciting student ideas, prompt- systems approach, make strong connec- horizon-research.com/NSSME/2012-nssme/
ing students to talk with each other to tions to human activity, and adopt research-products/reports/technical-report
(last accessed 22 Apr. 2019).
compare their ideas and explain their rea- research-based strategies that are shown Benjamin, A.S., and Tullis, J., 2010, What makes
soning, and situating the classroom as a to improve learning. distributed practice effective?: Cognitive
community that is working together to Now is the time to fulfill our “best Psychology, v. 61, no. 3, p. 228–247, https://
make sense of the Earth system. opportunity yet … to educate [our] citi- doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.05.004.
Since 2004, the use of small-group dis- zens about the complex and critical issues Cheesman, K., French, D., Cheesman, I., Swails,
cussion such as think-pair-share has grown of Earth science” (Wysession, 2014, N., and Thomas, J., 2007, Is there any common
curriculum for undergraduate biology majors
substantially in introductory geoscience p. 299). We have a solid foundation of in the 21st century?: Bioscience, v. 57, no. 6,
courses (Fig. 1), with ~35% of instructors discipline-based educational research p. 516–522, https://doi.org/10.1641/B570609.
reporting in 2016 that they use the tech- providing evidence for the practices that Climate Literacy Network, 2009, Climate
nique at least weekly. Whole-class discus- work in the classroom (McConnell et al., Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate
sion is used somewhat less frequently (Fig. 2017; NRC, 2012a), new curricular mate- Science: Washington, D.C., U.S. Global
Change Research Program/Climate Change
1), though this too is an important compo- rials that emphasize systems thinking and Science Program, https://www.climate.gov/
nent of building the sense of community in connections between Earth and human teaching/essential-principles-climate-literacy/
the classroom (Kloser, 2014). Well over activity (InTeGrate, 2017), a thriving essential-principles-climate-literacy (last
half of instructors have students work in community of practice (Kastens and accessed 22 Apr. 2019).
teams three or more times throughout a Manduca, 2017), and an imperative to Earth Science Literacy Initiative (ESLI), 2010,
Earth Science Literacy Principles: The Big
course, and over 80% do so at least once prepare teachers who can engage students Ideas and Supporting Concepts of Earth
(Fig. 2). Although both of the data sets in the science and engineering practices Science: Arlington, Virginia, National Science
examined in this study are self-reported, and productive discourse (Windschitl and Foundation, 13 p.
Teasdale et al. (2017) found a strong cor- Stroupe, 2017). We can make use of these Egger, A.E., Bruckner, M.Z., Birnbaum, S.J., and
relation between self-reports of the fre- research results and resources to make Gilbert, L.A., 2019, Facilitating the develop-
quency of use of in-class exercises and improvements in our introductory courses ment of effective interdisciplinary curricular
materials, in Gosselin, D.C., Egger, A.E., and
observations of student-student interactions, to better reach all students. Looking to Taber, J.J., eds., Interdisciplinary Teaching
group work, and discussion. The classrooms the future, as students emerge from K–12 about Earth and the Environment for a
where these behaviors were observed were systems built on the NGSS, they will Sustainable Future: Berlin, Springer, https://
classified as “student-centered,” which con- enter our classrooms with high expecta- doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03273-9_3.
stituted 25% of the total they observed— tions for using the skills they’ve devel- Freeman, S., Eddy, S.L., McDonough, M., Smith,
M.K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., and Wender-
a similar proportion to the proportion of oped in middle and high school to con- oth, M.P., 2014, Active learning increases
instructors who reported using in-class duct sophisticated analyses, address big student performance in science, engineering,
exercises and/or small-group discussion problems, and make a difference in the and mathematics: Proceedings of the National
in every class in 2016 (Fig. 1). world. We need to be ready for them. Academy of Sciences of the United States of
Several pedagogic strategies designed America, v. 111, https://doi.org/10.1073/
pnas.1319030111.
for the undergraduate classroom support ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Gilbert, L.A., Stempien, J., McConnell, D.A.,
the use of productive discourse, including Members of the National Geoscience Faculty Budd, D.A., van der Hoeven Kraft, K.J.,
lecture tutorials (Kortz et al., 2008), peer Survey research team provided valuable feedback Bykerk-Kauffman, A., Jones, M.H., Knight,
interactions and reflection (Mason and and support at several stages of this work, C.C., Matheney, R.K., Perkins, D., and Wirth,
Singh, 2010), and two-stage (or collabora- particularly Kim Kastens, Heather Macdonald, K.R., 2012, Not just “rocks for jocks”: Who
tive) exams (Gilley and Clarkston, 2014), Rory McFadden, Karen Viskupic, Becky Lien, and are introductory geology students and why are
they here?: Journal of Geoscience Education,
Karen McNeal. This work was funded by several
among many others. Providing students grants from the National Science Foundation to v. 60, no. 4, p. 360–371, https://doi.org/
the opportunity to think and process new On the Cutting Edge, InTeGrate, and SAGE 2YC. 10.5408/12-287.1.
www.geosociety.org/gsatoday 9