STORYTELLING IN GEOSCIENCE RESEARCH: AN ANALYSIS OF K-8 SCIENCE TEXTBOOKS AND THEIR PORTRAYAL OF SCALE IN ESS

Academic disciplines have different norms and expectations for reporting research results or telling an academic “story.” A challenge for those new to geoscience education research (GER) is learning how to tell a coherent research story that will be viewed favorably by a science education journal.

A sense of scale is important for geoscientists who must move mentally forth across spatial, temporal, and numeric scales as they go about their work. Because of its import to the profession, geoscience educators at all levels (university and K-12) need to help students develop increasingly sophisticated ideas about the scale of Earth’s processes and events. Many elementary and middle school Earth and Space Science (ESS) teachers rely on textbooks to guide their instruction and to improve their own subject matter knowledge. In this talk we describe the results of our analyses of images in K-8 science textbooks used in California, Florida, and Texas at grades K-8 in ESS chapters on astronomy, Earth materials and processes, and weather and climate. We also highlight our decision-making process for synthesizing our results to tell a coherent geoscience education research story.

We analyzed images for the way they depicted spatial, temporal, or numeric scale either as magnitude or as a relationship. Photographs and drawings are the most common ways scale is portrayed in the textbooks analyzed. Scale is depicted both quantitatively and qualitatively in the textbooks reviewed and scale information is often contained in a figure’s caption. Despite the importance of spatial, temporal, and numeric scale, information about the scale of objects or events in ESS is provided infrequently. In particular, we found scant evidence of information that would support student learning about unfamiliar scales. Qualitative scale units such as large have discipline-specific meanings which could be problematic for K-8 learners. Implications for research and the classroom will be discussed.