permission. The drawing is an abstract representation of a community framework for geoscience edu... more permission. The drawing is an abstract representation of a community framework for geoscience education research (GER). In it we see thematic grand challenges illuminating interconnected paths for future geoscience education research. Collectively this creates a guiding framework to harness the power of GER to improve undergraduate teaching and learning about the Earth.
This symposium will address how the breadth of investigation within the cognitive sciences can be... more This symposium will address how the breadth of investigation within the cognitive sciences can be brought to bear on applied everyday common problems, such as difficulties with reading charts and maps, and difficulties in using an in-car navigation device. Research with a problem-based focus often requires a systems approach that requires assimilation of work from many different disciplines. Such problems thus constitute ideal domains for illustrating the benefits of such multi-discipline and multimethod approaches. Speakers will focus on the use of spatial thinking in the context of examining these applied problems. These speakers span at least two disciplines, one a traditional discipline represented within cognitive science, and the other a related discipline such as geosciences and architecture.
... | Ayuda. Cross-Cultural Education of Geoscience Professionals: The Conferences of the Indigen... more ... | Ayuda. Cross-Cultural Education of Geoscience Professionals: The Conferences of the Indigenous Earth Sciences Project. Autores: Eric M. Riggs, Dawn Marsh Riggs; Localización: Journal of geoscience education, ISSN 1089-9995, Vol. 51, Nº 5, 2003 , pags. 527-535. ...
This study measures the effect that field-based instruction has on student learning of earth scie... more This study measures the effect that field-based instruction has on student learning of earth science content knowledge related to sedimentary rocks for college students intending to be pre-service elementary teachers. A total of 36 students from 2 semesters of a specialized earth science course for pre-service teachers participated in a mixed-methods study. The students received the same 3 day inquiry-based classroom curriculum and field trip preparation, but 3 variations of the field trip were administered. The first field trip was a guided-inquiry, hands-on exploration where students were actively involved in directing their learning, the second field trip was a lecture-based field trip where the instructor directed the student learning, the third was an immersive, inquiry-based virtual field trip presented in Quicktime VR. The quantitative findings indicate that all field trips produced gains in understanding beyond those produced by the classroom curriculum, and that this increase in learning came about regardless of the type of field trip the students experienced. Interviews and other qualitative analysis reveal that students who participated in the guided-inquiry, physical field trip did emerge with a deeper understanding of the conceptual ideas compared with other field trip styles.
In this presentation, we will discuss analysis of new video data collected from geology students ... more In this presentation, we will discuss analysis of new video data collected from geology students while learning in the field. Using the digital poster format, we will present findings from analysis of two sets of videos. First, we analyzed a set of new videos from students completing field mapping exercises as part of the Field Geology in the Rocky Mountains course offered at the Indiana University Geologic Field Station in Montana. To code the video we used an established coding framework (Maltese, Balliet & Riggs, In Press) to ...
The full extent of gender discrimination in university settings remains uncertain. More research ... more The full extent of gender discrimination in university settings remains uncertain. More research is needed to understand the scope of gender discrimination experiences in universities and to develop effective prevention approaches. However, Title IX and Institutional Review Board policies may hinder researchers' abilities to study gender discrimination in university settings. In this paper, we describe our experience working with the Institutional Review Board and Title IX offices to obtain approval for researching gender discrimination in university settings. We provide recommendations for how universities can enable gender discrimination research and follow Title IX policies.
INTRODUCTION The community of geoscience education researchers (GER) has reached a critical junct... more INTRODUCTION The community of geoscience education researchers (GER) has reached a critical juncture where it is taking inventory in regard to the work that has been accomplished and what questions still need to be answered in GER. Through cross-community participation in a series of recent workshops (St. John et al., 2015, 2016, 2017; Macdonald, 2016), the GER community discussed pathways forward that may have the greatest collective impact on advancing teaching and learning in the field. As a result, this theme issue Synthesizing Geoscience Education Research: Where are we? What is the path forward? was proposed. One of the justifications for the theme issue was the identified need to increase the strength of evidence in the geoscience education research literature. Using the strength of evidence pyramid (Fig. 1; for further explanation, see St. John and McNeal, 2017), we have categorized the past year (Fig. 1) of published articles in the Journal of Geoscience Education (JGE). Using the recent JGE issue as a gauge, it is clear that the geoscience literature has been lacking in regard to systematic review papers as well as meta-analyses. Review papers provide strong evidence for what has been done in the field and what future steps may need to be taken in a particular research area through the identification and articulation of the current state of the collective research in a given topic area. Meta-analyses combine datasets that a series of researchers have published and address higher order questions that require multiple data sources through largescale analyses of the collective datasets. This JGE special issue contributes 11 literature reviews to the community. It also contributes a high number of commentary papers (six) and editorials (two). The community has collectively thought about future research needs and potential areas of growth, and the commentary paper submission category in the JGE allows for authors to discuss a variety of topics that are of interest to the GER community. Both literature reviews and commentary papers are peer reviewed in the JGE. This special issue also contributes a curriculum and instruction (C&I) paper and a research paper. Most of the previous submissions to JGE can be categorized as either case or cohort studies, with a few practitioner knowledge pieces (e.g., commentaries) (Fig. 1). Nearly equal distribution of C&I and research papers are typically published, with C&I manuscripts being slightly greater. This special issue significantly adds manuscripts within the literature review and practitioner knowledge categories of the strength of evidence pyramid. Unfortunately, the GER community is not yet capable of producing robust meta-analyses as there is currently no formal mechanism in place to share datasets. This is, in part, an infrastructure issue as well as an institutional review board (IRB) issue, since all of the data for GER research is protected by IRB human subjects review, and to share the data on a larger scale, researchers need to include such requests in their IRB applications prior to conducting the research. There are strategies to work these issues out, and they are being discussed currently within the GER community. However, to date no mechanisms for sharing datasets have been put in place making it difficult to complete metaanalysis research in GER. Highlighted in this theme issue is a collection of articles focused on GER practice and community development (Kastens and Krumhansl, p. 373; Manduca, p. 416; Shipley et al., p. 354; and St. John and McNeal, p. 363), graduate training (Bitting et al., p. 519; and McNeal and Petcovic, p. 399), access and success in the geosciences (Callahan et al., p. 563; Carabajal et al., p. 531; McDaris and Manduca, p. 407; and Wolfe and Riggs, p. 577), teaching practice (Cheek et al., p. 455; Holder et al., p. 490; Liu et al., p. 435; McConnell et al., p. 604; Ormand et al., p. 426; and Scherer et al., p. 473), and cognition and affect (Jaeger et al., p. 506; Semken et al., p. 542; Shipley and Tikoff, p. 393; and van der Hoeven Kraft, p. 594). We recognize that there are many other areas that could have been written about as important topics for consideration for future directions in GER, and this special issue is not intended to be an exhaustive list of manuscripts or ideas. Rather, it is an attempt to move the community forward adding resources as we continue to collectively consider the path forward. Whether you are long vested in GER or are new to the geoscience education research field, this special issue provides a wealth of information about some of the key research areas in GER, as well as provide the impetus for research you may be interested in pursuing in the future. We summarize each of the articles included in this issue in the sections below.
Women continue to remain underrepresented in geoscience degree attainment. Several disciplines (s... more Women continue to remain underrepresented in geoscience degree attainment. Several disciplines (specifically geology) require participation in ‘field experiences’ in which students and faculty enga...
Words I never imagined writing As I write the introduction to this print issue of the Journal tod... more Words I never imagined writing As I write the introduction to this print issue of the Journal today, I find myself doing so, like virtually everyone else in the country and indeed the world, from my home office. Over the last few weeks and perhaps months, our working reality as university, college and K-12 educators and researchers has changed dramatically.
Abstract Gestures are physical manifestations of cognitive processes. Geology students often use ... more Abstract Gestures are physical manifestations of cognitive processes. Geology students often use gestures to describe geologic features and processes. The gestures allow students to convey 3- and 4-dimensional information about the rocks. Studying and characterizing these gestures can be useful in understanding students’ learning processes; however, previous attempts to categorize gestures used in geologic contexts by existing classification schemes have been unsuccessful. The most commonly used schemes developed by cognitive science researchers are too simplistic to capture the full range of gestures used by students and professional geologists. Therefore, we have developed a new classification scheme to categorize the most common gestures we see being used in a geologic context. This classification scheme describes both the gesture type—the shape the hands make—and the gesture function—the meaning or purpose of the gesture. We used a hermeneutical approach to interpret gesture meaning, drawing from concurrent speech and contextual surroundings when the gestures were made. We categorized 5 gesture types: point, domain, flat-hand, frame, and form gestures. We categorized 11 gesture functions: tracing, highlighting, locational, directional, rotational, constraining, sizing, emphasis, sequential, illustrative, and constructive gestures. We subdivided gesture functions into first-order and second-order gesture functions, depending on their complexity. Through this classification scheme, we are able to categorize and describe the vast majority of gestures used in a geologic context. If we want to better understand how, when, and why geology students use gestures, and how those gestures communicate their conceptual understanding of geologic features and processes, we need a consistent vocabulary to describe it. This lexicon provides a necessary tool for future work in studying embodied cognition within a geologic context and for assessing students’ understanding of geologic concepts.
New research into the ways that students learn and apply their knowledge is changing teaching met... more New research into the ways that students learn and apply their knowledge is changing teaching methods and undergraduate geoscience course content.
Meeting the future demand for a qualified geoscience workforce will require efforts to increase r... more Meeting the future demand for a qualified geoscience workforce will require efforts to increase recruitment, retention, and graduation of an increasingly diverse student body. Doing this successfully requires renewed attention to the needs and characteristics of underrepresented students, which include ethnic and cultural minorities, women, and students with disabilities. We synthesize the current literature on successful science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) diversity programs and programs in the geosciences specifically through the lens of educational macrosystems. Macrosystems are an element of an approach to analysis of educational systems and institutions that adopts a social-ecological model. Interacting subsystems of microsystems, mesosystems, macrosystems, and exosystems operate together to contribute to student success. STEM fields in general and geoscience in particular have benefited from recent research into microsystems, the student-centric, intrinsic aspects of success. The synthesis we present here is intended to add a new dimension to this body of literature, highlighting reports from successful STEM and geoscience-specific programs that have worked to strengthen macrosystems, which are extrinsic factors that surround students. These include peer support and faculty mentoring networks, institutional bridge programs, systemic pedagogy reforms, and purposeful work to improve campus climate, culture, and accountability for diversity. This synthesis is not comprehensive but rather aims to highlight and illustrate elements of selected successful programs. We conclude with general recommendations and observations intended to be helpful to the geosciences education community in directing future work to optimize macrosystems in support of diversifying the geosciences.
permission. The drawing is an abstract representation of a community framework for geoscience edu... more permission. The drawing is an abstract representation of a community framework for geoscience education research (GER). In it we see thematic grand challenges illuminating interconnected paths for future geoscience education research. Collectively this creates a guiding framework to harness the power of GER to improve undergraduate teaching and learning about the Earth.
This symposium will address how the breadth of investigation within the cognitive sciences can be... more This symposium will address how the breadth of investigation within the cognitive sciences can be brought to bear on applied everyday common problems, such as difficulties with reading charts and maps, and difficulties in using an in-car navigation device. Research with a problem-based focus often requires a systems approach that requires assimilation of work from many different disciplines. Such problems thus constitute ideal domains for illustrating the benefits of such multi-discipline and multimethod approaches. Speakers will focus on the use of spatial thinking in the context of examining these applied problems. These speakers span at least two disciplines, one a traditional discipline represented within cognitive science, and the other a related discipline such as geosciences and architecture.
... | Ayuda. Cross-Cultural Education of Geoscience Professionals: The Conferences of the Indigen... more ... | Ayuda. Cross-Cultural Education of Geoscience Professionals: The Conferences of the Indigenous Earth Sciences Project. Autores: Eric M. Riggs, Dawn Marsh Riggs; Localización: Journal of geoscience education, ISSN 1089-9995, Vol. 51, Nº 5, 2003 , pags. 527-535. ...
This study measures the effect that field-based instruction has on student learning of earth scie... more This study measures the effect that field-based instruction has on student learning of earth science content knowledge related to sedimentary rocks for college students intending to be pre-service elementary teachers. A total of 36 students from 2 semesters of a specialized earth science course for pre-service teachers participated in a mixed-methods study. The students received the same 3 day inquiry-based classroom curriculum and field trip preparation, but 3 variations of the field trip were administered. The first field trip was a guided-inquiry, hands-on exploration where students were actively involved in directing their learning, the second field trip was a lecture-based field trip where the instructor directed the student learning, the third was an immersive, inquiry-based virtual field trip presented in Quicktime VR. The quantitative findings indicate that all field trips produced gains in understanding beyond those produced by the classroom curriculum, and that this increase in learning came about regardless of the type of field trip the students experienced. Interviews and other qualitative analysis reveal that students who participated in the guided-inquiry, physical field trip did emerge with a deeper understanding of the conceptual ideas compared with other field trip styles.
In this presentation, we will discuss analysis of new video data collected from geology students ... more In this presentation, we will discuss analysis of new video data collected from geology students while learning in the field. Using the digital poster format, we will present findings from analysis of two sets of videos. First, we analyzed a set of new videos from students completing field mapping exercises as part of the Field Geology in the Rocky Mountains course offered at the Indiana University Geologic Field Station in Montana. To code the video we used an established coding framework (Maltese, Balliet & Riggs, In Press) to ...
The full extent of gender discrimination in university settings remains uncertain. More research ... more The full extent of gender discrimination in university settings remains uncertain. More research is needed to understand the scope of gender discrimination experiences in universities and to develop effective prevention approaches. However, Title IX and Institutional Review Board policies may hinder researchers' abilities to study gender discrimination in university settings. In this paper, we describe our experience working with the Institutional Review Board and Title IX offices to obtain approval for researching gender discrimination in university settings. We provide recommendations for how universities can enable gender discrimination research and follow Title IX policies.
INTRODUCTION The community of geoscience education researchers (GER) has reached a critical junct... more INTRODUCTION The community of geoscience education researchers (GER) has reached a critical juncture where it is taking inventory in regard to the work that has been accomplished and what questions still need to be answered in GER. Through cross-community participation in a series of recent workshops (St. John et al., 2015, 2016, 2017; Macdonald, 2016), the GER community discussed pathways forward that may have the greatest collective impact on advancing teaching and learning in the field. As a result, this theme issue Synthesizing Geoscience Education Research: Where are we? What is the path forward? was proposed. One of the justifications for the theme issue was the identified need to increase the strength of evidence in the geoscience education research literature. Using the strength of evidence pyramid (Fig. 1; for further explanation, see St. John and McNeal, 2017), we have categorized the past year (Fig. 1) of published articles in the Journal of Geoscience Education (JGE). Using the recent JGE issue as a gauge, it is clear that the geoscience literature has been lacking in regard to systematic review papers as well as meta-analyses. Review papers provide strong evidence for what has been done in the field and what future steps may need to be taken in a particular research area through the identification and articulation of the current state of the collective research in a given topic area. Meta-analyses combine datasets that a series of researchers have published and address higher order questions that require multiple data sources through largescale analyses of the collective datasets. This JGE special issue contributes 11 literature reviews to the community. It also contributes a high number of commentary papers (six) and editorials (two). The community has collectively thought about future research needs and potential areas of growth, and the commentary paper submission category in the JGE allows for authors to discuss a variety of topics that are of interest to the GER community. Both literature reviews and commentary papers are peer reviewed in the JGE. This special issue also contributes a curriculum and instruction (C&I) paper and a research paper. Most of the previous submissions to JGE can be categorized as either case or cohort studies, with a few practitioner knowledge pieces (e.g., commentaries) (Fig. 1). Nearly equal distribution of C&I and research papers are typically published, with C&I manuscripts being slightly greater. This special issue significantly adds manuscripts within the literature review and practitioner knowledge categories of the strength of evidence pyramid. Unfortunately, the GER community is not yet capable of producing robust meta-analyses as there is currently no formal mechanism in place to share datasets. This is, in part, an infrastructure issue as well as an institutional review board (IRB) issue, since all of the data for GER research is protected by IRB human subjects review, and to share the data on a larger scale, researchers need to include such requests in their IRB applications prior to conducting the research. There are strategies to work these issues out, and they are being discussed currently within the GER community. However, to date no mechanisms for sharing datasets have been put in place making it difficult to complete metaanalysis research in GER. Highlighted in this theme issue is a collection of articles focused on GER practice and community development (Kastens and Krumhansl, p. 373; Manduca, p. 416; Shipley et al., p. 354; and St. John and McNeal, p. 363), graduate training (Bitting et al., p. 519; and McNeal and Petcovic, p. 399), access and success in the geosciences (Callahan et al., p. 563; Carabajal et al., p. 531; McDaris and Manduca, p. 407; and Wolfe and Riggs, p. 577), teaching practice (Cheek et al., p. 455; Holder et al., p. 490; Liu et al., p. 435; McConnell et al., p. 604; Ormand et al., p. 426; and Scherer et al., p. 473), and cognition and affect (Jaeger et al., p. 506; Semken et al., p. 542; Shipley and Tikoff, p. 393; and van der Hoeven Kraft, p. 594). We recognize that there are many other areas that could have been written about as important topics for consideration for future directions in GER, and this special issue is not intended to be an exhaustive list of manuscripts or ideas. Rather, it is an attempt to move the community forward adding resources as we continue to collectively consider the path forward. Whether you are long vested in GER or are new to the geoscience education research field, this special issue provides a wealth of information about some of the key research areas in GER, as well as provide the impetus for research you may be interested in pursuing in the future. We summarize each of the articles included in this issue in the sections below.
Women continue to remain underrepresented in geoscience degree attainment. Several disciplines (s... more Women continue to remain underrepresented in geoscience degree attainment. Several disciplines (specifically geology) require participation in ‘field experiences’ in which students and faculty enga...
Words I never imagined writing As I write the introduction to this print issue of the Journal tod... more Words I never imagined writing As I write the introduction to this print issue of the Journal today, I find myself doing so, like virtually everyone else in the country and indeed the world, from my home office. Over the last few weeks and perhaps months, our working reality as university, college and K-12 educators and researchers has changed dramatically.
Abstract Gestures are physical manifestations of cognitive processes. Geology students often use ... more Abstract Gestures are physical manifestations of cognitive processes. Geology students often use gestures to describe geologic features and processes. The gestures allow students to convey 3- and 4-dimensional information about the rocks. Studying and characterizing these gestures can be useful in understanding students’ learning processes; however, previous attempts to categorize gestures used in geologic contexts by existing classification schemes have been unsuccessful. The most commonly used schemes developed by cognitive science researchers are too simplistic to capture the full range of gestures used by students and professional geologists. Therefore, we have developed a new classification scheme to categorize the most common gestures we see being used in a geologic context. This classification scheme describes both the gesture type—the shape the hands make—and the gesture function—the meaning or purpose of the gesture. We used a hermeneutical approach to interpret gesture meaning, drawing from concurrent speech and contextual surroundings when the gestures were made. We categorized 5 gesture types: point, domain, flat-hand, frame, and form gestures. We categorized 11 gesture functions: tracing, highlighting, locational, directional, rotational, constraining, sizing, emphasis, sequential, illustrative, and constructive gestures. We subdivided gesture functions into first-order and second-order gesture functions, depending on their complexity. Through this classification scheme, we are able to categorize and describe the vast majority of gestures used in a geologic context. If we want to better understand how, when, and why geology students use gestures, and how those gestures communicate their conceptual understanding of geologic features and processes, we need a consistent vocabulary to describe it. This lexicon provides a necessary tool for future work in studying embodied cognition within a geologic context and for assessing students’ understanding of geologic concepts.
New research into the ways that students learn and apply their knowledge is changing teaching met... more New research into the ways that students learn and apply their knowledge is changing teaching methods and undergraduate geoscience course content.
Meeting the future demand for a qualified geoscience workforce will require efforts to increase r... more Meeting the future demand for a qualified geoscience workforce will require efforts to increase recruitment, retention, and graduation of an increasingly diverse student body. Doing this successfully requires renewed attention to the needs and characteristics of underrepresented students, which include ethnic and cultural minorities, women, and students with disabilities. We synthesize the current literature on successful science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) diversity programs and programs in the geosciences specifically through the lens of educational macrosystems. Macrosystems are an element of an approach to analysis of educational systems and institutions that adopts a social-ecological model. Interacting subsystems of microsystems, mesosystems, macrosystems, and exosystems operate together to contribute to student success. STEM fields in general and geoscience in particular have benefited from recent research into microsystems, the student-centric, intrinsic aspects of success. The synthesis we present here is intended to add a new dimension to this body of literature, highlighting reports from successful STEM and geoscience-specific programs that have worked to strengthen macrosystems, which are extrinsic factors that surround students. These include peer support and faculty mentoring networks, institutional bridge programs, systemic pedagogy reforms, and purposeful work to improve campus climate, culture, and accountability for diversity. This synthesis is not comprehensive but rather aims to highlight and illustrate elements of selected successful programs. We conclude with general recommendations and observations intended to be helpful to the geosciences education community in directing future work to optimize macrosystems in support of diversifying the geosciences.
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Papers by Eric Riggs