TEXAS STEM TEACHER PERCEPTIONS AND AWARENESS OF THE GEOSCIENCES

Difficulty attracting students into university geoscience programs is forecast to create a shortfall in the geoscience workforce. Increased awareness of the geosciences among secondary STEM teachers is necessary to help recruit high school students into the geosciences. In Texas, college-bound high school students generally take a sequence of pre-AP and AP STEM courses and are not exposed to geoscience.

As part of our NSF GEOPAths-funded project, Geoscience Exposure and Training in Texas (GET TX), we established a Geoscience Learning Ecosystem (GLE) that included workshops for high school STEM teachers in southeast Texas. To participate in the workshops, teachers were offered professional development credit, as well as stipends. The workshops provided geoscience-themed exercises that meet state-level learning objectives (TEKS) for each STEM discipline. Teachers completed pre- and post-surveys about their perceptions of the geosciences. Here, we present pre-survey data from three years of workshops. Teachers were asked about their perceptions of “geoscience” and “geology” relative to other disciplines, integration of geoscience topics into required Texas high school STEM classes, as well as their perceptions of student career interests. Almost 40% of teacher participants had two or more college-level geoscience courses. Almost all (96%) agreed or strongly agreed with “Applied, real-life examples help my students learn math and science effectively.” Sixty percent agreed or strongly agreed with “I integrate geoscience and environmental examples into my math and science classes.” The purpose of workshops was to fill this gap. In terms of geoscience topics, STEM teachers were most interested in field geology, geochemistry, and environmental geology, whereas mineralogy and petroleum geology fell near the bottom. Many of these teachers had the erroneous perception that geology is just about rocks and minerals. Our pre-survey data indicate that integrating more modern examples of geoscience applications and building strong connections with secondary STEM teachers (GLE’s) could help to improve STEM teacher perceptions of the geosciences.