GEOSCIENTIFIC EDUCATIONAL VIDEO DESIGN, ASSESSMENT AND DISSEMINATION: AN EXAMPLE USING THE PERMIAN BASIN OF W. TEXAS AND SW NEW MEXICO

The geoscientific community needs to generate more high-quality, scientifically accurate animations and videos to teach students and communicate to the public and policymakers about geoscientific topics. However, it is not clear what are “best practices” for producing geoscientific videos and animations, assessing these in the classroom, and disseminating these to other potential users. To explore these questions, we made a hybrid geoscientific video and animation introducing the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico. Choosing the Permian Basin as the topic was inspired by a graduate course ‘The Geology of the Permian Basin’ taught at UT Dallas in Fall 2017 that was taken by the first author and partly taught by the second author. The class was taught because the basin is experiencing an upsurge of US economic activity and many geoscience graduates are likely to become involved in extracting hydrocarbons from it. It was recognized in that class that even graduate students have limited knowledge of the Permian Basin, suggesting that geoscience undergraduate students know even less about Permian Basin geology, reflecting the lack of content about the Permian Basin in most sedimentology, stratigraphy, and tectonics textbooks. The Permian Basin video is about 6 minutes long and presents basic geological and geographic information about the Permian Basin; it can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSJO5Xr2zgU. To optimize the pedagogical content of the video, we applied selective attention theory and cognitive load theory in the video production. Assessment involved giving the same 10 question multiple choice quiz before and after students watched the video/animation. Significant improvement in student understanding is revealed by comparing exam scores, which increased from a mean of 39% to 75% correct. These results also suggest a relationship between improved understanding of a topic and time spent on that topic in the video. For dissemination, we found that notifying geoscientific on-line communities (such as GSA, AGU, and Sigma Xi) about the existence of the video was effective. These results will inform our future efforts to create and assess geoscience educational videos, see https://utdgss2016.wixsite.com/utdgss.