Socially relevant geoscience topics may be difficult for students to learn. For example, connecting hydraulic fracturing to Midwestern US earthquake swarms and using the fossil record to infer past Earth environments may challenge students because of their prior exposures to nonscientific explanations. Sociocognitive theoretical perspectives based on decades of developmental and educational psychology, as well as science education research posit that students may have particular difficulty in evaluating the connections between lines of scientific evidence and explanations. This challenge is especially daunting when students are confronted with various alternative explanations (e.g., scientific and nonscientific explanations). In the present study, we compared two types of scaffolds designed to facilitate Mid-Atlantic middle school students’ (N = 40) scientific thinking and learning about controversial geoscience topics when confronted with alternative explanations. In a less autonomy-supportive scaffold, participants were given four lines of evidence and two explanatory models, one scientific and one nonscientific. (Fracking; Supplementary Materials 1 & 2); in a more autonomy-supportive scaffold, students chose four of eight lines of evidence and two of three explanatory models, one scientific and two nonscientific (Fossils; Supplementary Materials 1 & 2). Quantitative analyses revealed that both activities facilitated students’ evaluations in shifting students’ judgments toward the scientific and deepening their knowledge, although the more autonomy-supportive activity had greater effect sizes. Structural equation modeling suggested that more scientific judgments related to greater knowledge at post-instruction for the more autonomy-supportive scaffold. These activities may help students develop more scientific evaluation skills, which are central to understanding geoscience content and science as a process.
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An interdisciplinary approach to building students’ spatial thinking skills from high school through college
There is a large gap between the ability of experts and
students in grasping spatial concepts and representations.
Engineering and the geosciences require the highest expertise
in spatial thinking, and weak spatial skills are a significant
barrier to success for many students [1]. Spatial skills are also
highly malleable [2]; therefore, a current challenge is to
identify how to promote students’ spatial thinking.
Interdisciplinary research on how students think about
spatially-demanding problems in the geosciences has
identified several major barriers for students and interventions
to help scaffold learning at a variety of levels from high
school through upper level undergraduate majors. The
Geoscience Education Transdisciplinary Spatial Learning
Network (GET-Spatial; http://serc.carleton.edu/getspatial/) is
an NSF-funded collaboration between geoscientists, cognitive
psychologists, and education researchers. Our goal is to help
students overcome initial hurdles in reasoning about spatial
problems in an effort to diversify the geoscience workforce.
Examples of spatial problems in the fields of
geochemistry include scaling, both in size and time;
penetrative thinking to make inferences about internal
structures from surface properties; and graph-reading,
especially ternary diagrams. Understanding scales outside of
direct human experience, both very large (e.g.
cosmochemistry, deep time) and very small (e.g. mineralogy,
nanoparticles) can be acutely difficult for students. However,
interventions have successfully resulted in improvements to
scale estimations and improve exam performance [3].
We will discuss best practices for developing effective
interdisciplinary teams, and how to overcome challenges of
working across disciplines and across grade levels. We will
provide examples of spatial interventions in scaling and
penetrative thinking.
[1] Hegarty et al. (2010) in Spatial Cognition VII 6222, 85-
94. [2] Uttal et al. (2012) Psychology of Learning and
Motivation 57, 147-181. [3] Resnick et al. (2016)
Educational Psychology Review, 1-15.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1640800
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10033094
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Program and abstracts - V.M. Goldschmidt Conference
- ISSN:
- 1042-7287
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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