Cinzia Cervato

How Geoscientists Think and Learn

Decades ago, pioneering petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt pointed out that oil is first found in the human mind. His insight remains true today: Across geoscience specialties, the human mind is arguably the geoscientists most important tool. It is the mind that converts colors and textures of dirt, or blotches on a satellite image, or wiggles on a seismogram, into explanatory narratives about the formation and migration of oil, the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the opening and closing of oceans. Improved understanding of how humans think and learn about the Earth can help geoscientists and geoscience educators do their jobs better, and can highlight the strengths that geoscience expertise brings to interdisciplinary problem solving.

The InVEST Volcanic Concept Survey: Exploring Student Understanding about Volcanoes.

Results from the Volcanic Concept Survey (VCS) indicated that many undergraduates do not fully understand volcanic systems and plate tectonics. During the 2006 academic year, a ten-item conceptual survey was distributed to undergraduate students enrolled in Earth science courses at five U.S. colleges and universities. A trained team of graders scored 672 completed surveys, coding responses to each item with a score, out of 3, based on accuracy and comprehensiveness. Questions requiring only basic content knowledge (e.g., terminology, volcano topology) received more high scoring responses than questions requiring higher thinking and deeper conceptual connections (association with plate tectonics, prediction of hazards and impacts on the environment). The mechanics of eruptions also appeared to be poorly understood. Special attention was paid to students’ alternate conceptions about where volcanoes are likely to form. Male students, students highly interested in science, and students who lived in a volcanically active area received significantly higher total scores than other student groups. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors also performed significantly better than non-STEM majors. Understanding the nature of student comprehension and misconception may be useful for geoscience educators seeking to address student preconceptions and promote conceptual change.

Diagnostic Testing of Introductory Geology Students

A diagnostic test for assessing the general and Earth science knowledge of entry-level college students was administered to 451 students in 2002 and 401 students in 2003 enrolled in an introductory geology course at Iowa State University. The study shows that male students, seniors, and science-technology-math majors score higher than female students, freshmen, and non-science-technology-math majors and that the differences are statistically significant. Also, students who scored higher on the diagnostic test were more likely to pass the course. The results support the feasibility of a standardized diagnostic test as a tool for geoscience instructors for curriculum planning, student advising, and curriculum assessment, similar to standardized diagnostic testing and pre-post testing used in chemistry and physics courses. Standardized national tests would enhance college geoscience education.

Today's Forecast: Higher Thinking With a Chance of Conceptual Growth

Weather has all the characteristics of a motivating, authentic subject: Everybody has an interest in it and strong opinions about it. This interest has provided a way to tie science to a meaningful learning activity in an introductory meteorology course for nonscience students. The pedagogical foundation of such a course is that it is more important for students in science classes to learn to think like scientists than to accumulate facts; weather forecasting allows them to progressively apply their knowledge about the atmosphere by hypothesizing the next days weather. By forecasting tomorrows weather repeatedly throughout the course, students are given the opportunity to link what they are learning in class to a topic to which they all relate.

Calibrated Peer Review Assignments for the Earth Sciences

Calibrated Peer Review ™ (CPR), a web-based instructional tool developed as part of the National Science Foundation reform initiatives in undergraduate science education, allows instructors to incorporate multiple writing assignments in large courses without overwhelming the instructor. This study reports successful implementation of CPR in a large, introductory geology course and student learning of geoscience content. For each CPR assignment in this study, students studied web-based and paper resources, wrote an essay, and reviewed seven essays (three from the instructor, three from peers, and their own) on the topic. Although many students expressed negative attitudes and concerns, particularly about the peer review process of this innovative instructional approach, they also recognized the learning potential of completing CPR assignments. Comparing instruction on earthquakes and plate boundaries using a CPR assignment vs. an instructional video lecture and homework essay with extensive instructor feedback, students mastered more content via CPR instruction.

The Big Crunch: A Hybrid Solution to Earth and Space Science Instruction for Elementary Education Majors

ABSTRACT We describe the rationale and process for the development of a new hybrid Earth and Space Science course for elementary education majors. A five-step course design model, applicable to both online and traditional courses, is presented. Assessment of the course outcomes after two semesters indicates that the intensive time invested in the development of the course results in a manageable workload during the semester for faculty with an already full teaching load. We also found that average scores in proctored online exams for this cohort of students are identical to the average scores of students from the same major enrolled in a face-to-face (F2F) course. Exam scores significantly improved in the second semester after adjustments to the workload and the introduction of explicit test-taking tips at the beginning of the semester. We found that our students, at all stages of their studies, were not used to the self-guided instruction required for success in online courses, and were often not as comfortable using Web-based technology for instruction as we expected.

Dynamic weather forecaster: results of the testing of a collaborative, on-line educational platform for weather forecasting

The online Dynamic Weather Forecaster is an open, collaborative application available now to high-school and college instructors across the United States who would like to easily incorporate weather forecasting in their instruction. The application consists of a set of 13 questions that allow students to submit forecasts that cover most of the parameters used by professional weather forecasters. Submissions are automatically validated against weather parameters and graded. We tested the impact of the application on the learning of 199 undergraduate students in an introductory meteorology course in spring 2008. Students who begin forecasting early in the semester and continue to do so throughout the semester are statistically significantly more successful in the course than students who start late or complete a low number of forecasts. College, year in school, and gender were not significant predictors of success. Students found the application easy to use, and 92.3% of them found it at least somewhat helpful as they learned about the weather. Through the use of the DWF, students also experience first-hand that uncertainty is a critical part of weather forecasting and of scientific studies in general. With sufficient interest from potential users outside the USA, the DWF platform could easily be expanded to include global weather data.

V-Volcano: Addressing Students' Misconceptions in Earth Sciences Learning through Virtual Reality Simulations

Research in teaching and learning about Earth Sciences indicates that first year geology students not only lack knowledge about basic concepts, but that they may also have developed their own potentially incorrect explanations of those phenomena. Understanding volcanic concepts is one of the areas in which noticeable misconceptions occur, as a significant number of students seem to acquire their knowledge from non-traditional sources such as sensationalist media and catastrophic films. This paper presents V-Volcano, a virtual reality volcano activity learning environment that immerses students in a scientifically-accurate simulation of volcanic systems. Students are able to generate and manipulate volcanic eruptions in real-time with data monitoring to explore the effects of changing conditions. The goal is to provide a geoscience tool that can be used to correct student misunderstandings about volcanic phenomena.

Quantifying the Level of Inquiry in a Reformed Introductory Geology Lab Course

ABSTRACT As part of a campus-wide effort to transform introductory science courses to be more engaging and more accurately convey the excitement of discovery in science, the curriculum of an introductory physical geology lab course was redesigned. What had been a series of “cookbook” lab activities was transformed into a sequence of activities based on scientific inquiry and cooperative learning. The first two semesters were spent developing and implementing the new lab activities, and two more semesters were spent refining them. In the second semester of each of these two phases, students enrolled in the lab completed a 15-question version of the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI; Libarkin and Anderson, 2005); there were significant improvements from pretest to posttest scores. Student evaluations before and after the reform are not significantly different and overall positive. This paper presents an overview of the lab activities in the new curriculum, a detailed analysis of the type and level of inquiry in each lab, and the assessment of the impact on student learning.

Weather Forecasting as a Learning Tool in a Large Service Course: Does Practice Make Perfect?

Each spring roughly 200 students, mostly nonmajors, enroll in the Introduction to Meteorology course at Iowa State University and are required to make at least 25 forecasts throughout the semester. The Dynamic Weather Forecaster (DWF) forecasting platform requires students to forecast more than just simple ‘‘numeric’’ forecasts and includes questions on advection, cloudiness, and precipitation factors that are not included in forecast contests often used in meteorology courses. The present study examines the evolution of forecasting skill for students enrolled in the class in spring 2010 and 2011 and compares student performance with that of an ‘‘expert forecaster.’’ The expert forecasters were chosen from meteorology students in an advanced forecasting course who showed exemplary forecasting skill throughout the previous semester. It is shown that these introductory students improve in forecast skill over only the first 10‐15 days that they forecast, a number smaller than the 25 days found in an earlier study examining meteorology majors in an upper-level course. The skill of both groups plateaus after that time. An analysis of two types of questions in the DWF reveals that students do have skill slightly better than that of a persistence forecast when predicting parameters traditionallyused in forecastingcontests,but fail to outperformpersistencewhen predicting more complex atmospheric processes like temperature advection and factors influencing precipitation such as moisture content and instability. The introduction of a contest ‘‘with prizes’’ halfway through the semester in 2011 was found to have at best mixed impacts on forecast skill.