CONVECTION: AN EXCELLENT THEME FOR AN EARTH SCIENCE COURSE FOR PROSPECTIVE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS
Early on, we spend a full week focusing on convection because students come into the course with many misconceptions and little understanding of basic concepts such as volume, mass and density. Students begin the lab on convection by observing convection currents in miso soup. Students then proceed through a series of engaging hands-on discovery-based activities that build the concepts of density, buoyancy and thermal expansion. The lab culminates with a comparison of fluid flow (using food coloring as a tracer) within two different beakers: one heated from above and one heated from below. Through readings, homework and lecture, the concepts that students discover in this lab are reinforced and applied to mantle convection and plate motion.
Throughout the semester, students repeatedly apply the knowledge gained from that first lab as they build their understanding of other natural processes. Thus students learn, by experience, the inherent simplicity that underlies the amazing complexity of the universe. And they begin to perceive that the essence of scientific knowledge can be grasped and that science neednt be an overwhelming barrage of confusing unrelated details.
The course materials on convection (and over 500 pages of additional course materials) for the Concepts in Earth Sciences course are available at www.csuchico.edu/~abykerkk. The development of these course materials was supported by NSF Grant #9455371.