Disconnection between students and nature in an urban setting thwarts student engagement and impedes geoscience teaching and learning. Conducting field trips is one way to engage students, but the urban environment does not provide an ideal setting with respect to the availability of appropriate field sites and safety. This text reports on a field-based inquiry project conducted in San Antonio, Texas. ... Full description.

Instructing university-level Earth history to future teachers is made all the more difficult when it is being done in an urban environment devoid of any local rock outcroppings. At the University of South Alabama, which is located along the rock-free central Gulf Coast, researchers have attempted to improve Earth history instruction to education majors. This paper describes their approach. The authors ... Full description.

NOTE: This is a large file, 95.8 mb in size! One way to envision our mental knowledge structure is as a hyperlinked network of concepts, a concept map. Concept maps are a useful tool to help students articulate ideas, identify and arrange key concepts, and see how these ideas and concepts are connected. For geology, however, concept maps fail to take advantage of the very visual nature of the science ... Full description.

This article describes an interactive game that can be used in conjunction with traditional laboratory work, group discussions, student presentations, and writing exercises. It provides an enjoyable and motivating dimension to a university seminar/lab course in Historical Geology and Paleontology. A simple spelling-bee-type game evolves over ten weeks into a room-sized board game based on the geologic ... Full description.

NOTE: This is a large file, 22.7 mb in size! As urban development encroaches onto less suitable sites, knowledge of the connection between the ground beneath one's home and the home itself becomes increasingly critical to the homebuyer. This paper describes an applied course designed for Realtors and appraisers that the author founded and taught for about eight years in Colorado. It describes the ... Full description.

NOTE: This is a large file, 165.8 mb in size! This article describes a study in which students' conceptual understanding about the Earth was examined. In the study, students enrolled in introductory science courses at four institutions, completed open-ended questionnaires, and participated in interviews. The institutions consisted of a small private university, two large state schools, and one small ... Full description.

This article describes GLOBE, Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment, a K-12 environmental education program supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The GLOBE program was introduced to teachers in a series of inservice workshops at Southeastern ... Full description.

This article describes a study analyzing narrative essays, stories of rock formation, written by pre-service elementary school teachers. Most of these students had completed a college-level course in earth science, yet they expressed startling misconceptions about how rocks form. These misconceptions arise from deeply held but largely unexamined beliefs (conceptual prisms) that result from the interaction ... Full description.

Online Evaluation Resource Library (OERL) is library developed for professionals seeking to design, conduct, document, or review project evaluations. Its resources include instruments, plans, and reports from evaluations that have proven to be sound and representative of current evaluation practices. Also included are alignment tables that contain criteria and a glossary to help users develop their ... Full description.