JUDGING A COURSE BY ITS COVER: AN ANALYSIS OF CATALOG DESCRIPTIONS OF EARTH SCIENCE COURSES FOR FUTURE TEACHERS

Over the past several years, numerous workshops, conference sessions, and other meetings have occurred with the goal of helping geoscience faculty improve or establish specific courses for pre-service teachers. Increasingly, these courses are expected not only to build students’ disciplinary content knowledge but also to develop students’ knowledge of how to teach the content. Online course catalogs provide an accessible means for capturing current trends in the design of these courses for preservice teachers. In this project, we use course descriptions to answer the following question: how common are courses that integrate geoscience content with either pedagogical theories, instructional techniques, or knowledge of how to apply science standards to lesson development?

In pursuit of this question, we compiled a list of undergraduate institutions offering degrees in geology using the 51st edition of the AGI Directory of Geoscience Departments and limited our sample to institutions in a single section of GSA. For each institution, we searched course descriptions of education and geology departments for those that both included earth science content and targeted future elementary or secondary teachers. We coded each course title and description for mention of standards, teaching theories or techniques, as well as earth science or general science content. Course descriptions can be grouped into three different categories: those that include learning objectives for 1) Earth science content along with instructional techniques for teaching; 2) Earth science content along with theories of learning or teaching; and 3) Earth science content alone. We note, too, that course descriptions do not often make clear how the courses fit into degree requirements. Future work will investigate how courses that include Earth science content feature into the full program of study for preparation of elementary and secondary teachers.