DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION, AND COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE OUTCOMES OF SOUTHWEST PLACE-BASED APPROACHES TO TEACHING INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE AND EARTH SCIENCE FOR TEACHERS

Place-based (PB) geoscience teaching focuses on local environments, and synthesizes scientific and cultural knowledge of these places, to leverage “sense of place” and engage students, particularly non-majors. This is claimed to be particularly appropriate and effective for minority students with cultural and historical ties to these places, such as American Indian and Hispanic groups in the Southwest. As part of an ongoing study to characterize sense of place in and test PB teaching for culturally diverse students, we report on design methodology of, implementation of, and quantitative and qualitative research findings from a Southwest PB course. This was piloted in a diverse 30-student class in fall 2005, and several lessons were excerpted for use in four off-campus sections (70 students total) of an inquiry science-math course for in-service grade 8-12 teachers in the Phoenix area in spring 2006. The same approach is now being tested in a 220-student lecture setting, and with teachers in bilingual American Indian- and Hispanic-majority districts in the copper country of central Arizona.

Curriculum development was guided by “backward design” (Wiggins and McTigue), learning-cycle (Lawson), and PB methodologies, and incorporated elements from an early PB intro course taught at the Navajo tribal college. We assessed cognitive and affective outcomes of the pilot course with pre-and-post administration of four validated surveys: a subtest from the Geoscience Content Inventory (Libarkin et al.), a Place Meaning Survey (Young), a Place Attachment Inventory (Williams and Vaske; Semken et al.), and a geology-specific version of the Views About Science Survey (GeoVASS; Halloun et al.). The pilot course yielded statistically significant pre-post increases in the first three surveys and improvement from more “folk” to more “expert” understanding of science and science teaching on the GeoVASS. The work is supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number EHR-0412537) and by the Arizona Board of Regents.