VISION AND CHANGE: THE FUTURE OF UNDERGRADUATE GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION

Over the last six years, the entire geoscience community, including academia and employers, has established a robust consensus on the geoscience concepts, skills and competencies that need to be developed by undergraduates to be successful in the workforce and/or in graduate school. Well over 1,000 geoscientists have contributed to this vision for the future of geoscience undergraduate education.

The consensus includes not just the what, but the how. Concepts, skills and competencies should be developed across multiple courses and educational experiences. Courses and activities should enable students to develop an understanding of broad geoscience concepts, including processes and impacts, and to build a working framework for knowledge gained during their education and future career. Activities that develop geoscience skills and competencies at progressively higher levels, should be integrated into multiple classes so students can practice, establish mastery and recognize how these skills are broadly employed. Geoscience work today and even more in the future requires key quantitative reasoning and computational skills and professional skills (communication, teamwork, project management, etc.) be included in the undergraduate program. Students should be developing competencies so that they can continue to use these concepts and skills to solve other geoscience problems in the future. Authentic experiences, such as fieldwork, research projects, and exercises that involve acquiring and analyzing real data, provide students experience and practice in developing competencies, geoscience and systems thinking, and problem solving. Numerous approaches inside and outside the classroom have been identified and are outlined in the Vision and Change for the Future of Undergraduate Geoscience Education.