GEOSCIENCE RESEARCH AND INFORMATION NEEDS FOR SUPPORTING AND IMPROVING K-12 EARTH AND SPACE SCIENCES TEACHER EDUCATION

A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas (2012) and the Next Generation Science Standards (2013) are significant for the geoscience education community because they place the teaching and learning of the Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) on par with the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Engineering across K-12 education. High quality ESS instruction will require a K-12 teaching workforce that is diverse and fully prepared to teach ESS. The preparation of future ESS teachers is challenging because the teacher education landscape is complex. Teacher preparation programs vary considerably across the country and even within states. They are impacted by many external factors, including different teacher licensure requirements across states, priorities of K-12 partners, and the impact of state and national standards documents.

Here we report on three grand challenges for future geoscience education research (GER) related to teacher education, which were developed as part of the NSF-funded A Framework for Transformative Geoscience Education Research project that identified priority research questions for 10 GER themes. 1) The ESS teacher workforce should reflect the diversity of K-12 learners. Future research needs to identify strategies to attract, support, and retain a more diverse K-12 ESS teaching workforce that will engage a diverse student population. 2) Teacher education programs need to prepare teacher candidates who are well-prepared to teach ESS. Effective models that incorporate ESS into undergraduate teacher preparation programs and provide quality professional development for inservice teachers need to be investigated. Finally, 3) in this changing science education landscape, research needs to explore how to prepare future and inservice teachers to promote three-dimensional learning in ESS.