ENHANCING OUTREACH STRATEGIES BASED ON CURRENT MISPERCEPTIONS OF GEOSCIENCE AMONG STUDENTS AND THE PUBLIC

Enrollment in geoscience departments is currently decreasing, which is projected to cause a major shortage of geoscientists in the workforce over the next decade. It is crucial that we reverse this trend as geoscientists are vital for studying and combating the effects of climate change and other geological hazards. This study identifies major student and public misperceptions of geoscience, with the goal increasing geoscience enrollment and engagement by developing outreach strategies that transform such misperceptions. This work involves the investigation of student and public perceptions of and motivations for pursuing geoscience via survey data. Through surveying university students (geoscience majors as well as non-majors) and members of the general public (via science-focused social media channels and the Amazon Web Service platform, Mechanical Turk), the data collected provide a diverse pool of about 500 respondents from which to draw broad conclusions regarding geoscience perceptions. Major findings from preliminary results suggest that people don’t understand the meaning of geology as they associate the term ‘geology’ with rocks and ‘geoscience’ with Earth. These ‘old-fashioned’ stereotypical views of geology deter many students from entering the field and validate the name changes many geoscience departments are making around the world. Moreover, the most pronounced misperceptions of geoscience based on the survey responses are (1) that “geoscience offers limited career opportunities” and (2) that “geoscience caused (or heavily contributed to) climate change”. The majority of student respondents who agreed with these statements also said that these perceptions deterred them from pursuing geoscience. With more findings like these, we plan to develop more effective outreach and recruitment strategies for geoscience departments that will increase both student enrollment and public engagement. This work is ongoing, but this presentation summarizes our preliminary findings, future plans, and outlook.