HOW DO WE LEARN HOW STUDENTS ARE TO LEARN? GER GRAND CHALLENGES ON SOLID EARTH CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING

The 2017 Earth Educators Rendezvous facilitated NSF-funded working groups of geoscience education researchers (GER) and stakeholders to draft "Grand Challenges,” spanning 10 GER research themes. Challenges were supported by current literature and include recommended strategies to meet them. One working group addressed student conceptions of the Solid Earth, seeking to facilitate student learning from the surface of the Earth to the core. The undergraduate curriculum commonly encompasses geomorphology, historical and structural geology, mineralogy, petrology, and stratigraphy. This curriculum is vast, but the 3-dimensional structure in A Framework for K-12 Science Education (AFK12SE; NRC, 2012), can inform undergraduate solid Earth instruction.

The Solid Earth working group articulated two grand challenges (a) determining students' solid Earth misconceptions when they participate in geoscience coursework, including persistence and the means to address them, and (b) determining optimal learning progressions for the range of undergraduate students in geoscience courses. Student misconceptions about fundamental components of the solid Earth are an impediment to learning the complexity of solid Earth systems and connections to other Earth systems. Furthermore, approaches to undergraduate geoscience curricula that meet the needs of majors and non-majors should have empirical support. Learning progressions, derived from K-12 education, can aid in defining a structure through which conceptual complexity can be developed.

This presentation will discuss the knowledge base for these challenges, providing potential research strategies for addressing these needs. These strategies include a gap analysis of existing solid Earth concepts literature on misconceptions and frameworks to evaluate instructional practices to address them. They also include identifying best research practices for identifying misconceptions, engaging with education research faculty to develop learning progressions, and outlining methods to determine the efficacy of curricular innovations grounded in learning progressions. The risks associated with poor student understanding of solid Earth concepts are non-trivial, shown by poor decision-making by otherwise rational individuals across their life-span.