Katherine Ryker

Creating a Community of Practice Around Geoscience Education Research: NAGT-GER

The Journal of Geoscience Education (JGE) has been a valued scholarly dissemination outlet for geoscience education researchers and practitioners for over three decades. This community of scholars ...

Applying the Geoscience Education Research Strength of Evidence Pyramid: Developing a Rubric to Characterize Existing Geoscience Teaching Assistant Training Studies

ABSTRACT Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are responsible for direct instruction of geoscience undergraduate students at an array of universities and have a major effect on the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of their students. GTAs benefit from in-department training in both beliefs and practices that align with the existing literature on teaching and learning in the discipline, and such training can have long-standing effects when GTAs transition into faculty roles. However, the most recent review, in 2003, revealed little literature examining outcomes of geoscience GTA training programs. Using the framework of the GER Strength of Evidence Pyramid, this article outlines the development and application of a rubric to allow the user to analyze the existing geoscience GTA training literature and provide example study designs at each level of strength. Extending back to 1980, we discovered a total of three peer-reviewed articles describing and empirically evaluating the effect of GTA training programs in the geosciences. Thus, this article also draws from other science disciplines to provide examples for the levels of the rubric not currently represented in the geoscience literature, providing a set of contextually similar models that future designers of geoscience GTA training might draw on to maximize their strength of evidence, given specific institutional and programmatic constraints. Furthermore, we describe ways in which the use of the rubric provides a framework for characterizing the GTA training literature, which revealed areas of research and characteristics of rigor needed for future work.

Assessing Inquiry in Physical Geology Laboratory Manuals

ABSTRACT Many agencies, organizations, and researchers have called for the incorporation of inquiry-based learning in college classrooms. Providing inquiry-based activities in laboratory courses is one way to promote reformed, student-centered teaching in introductory geoscience courses. However, the literature on inquiry has relatively few geoscience examples and features an array of modifiers that complicate instructor efforts to identify or adapt inquiry-based activities for their courses. We review several measurement protocols developed to assess inquiry in laboratory activities. We apply one of these to assess the level of inquiry present in four published physical geology laboratory manuals. While the majority of activities used in the published manuals were classified at low levels of inquiry, these manuals also contained examples of higher-level activities that were not identified in previous analyses. We describe the development of inquiry-based lessons for inclusion in a freshman-level physical geology laboratory course at a large public research university in the southeast U.S. and apply the same protocol to assess the laboratory course activities and discuss how some activities were adapted to increase inquiry levels. We discuss how other instructors or laboratory course developers can adapt existing activities to incorporate higher levels of inquiry in their laboratory courses, matching them with the type of information or skill they want students to learn.

Synthesis: Discussion and Implications

Kristen St. John, James Madison University; Kelsey Bitting, Northeastern University; Cinzia Cervato, Iowa State University; Kim A. Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; Heather Macdonald, College of William & Mary; John R. McDaris, SERC at Carleton College; Karen S. McNeal, Auburn University; Heather L. Petcovic, Western Michigan University; Eric J. Pyle, James Madison University; Eric M. Riggs, Texas A&M University; Katherine Ryker, University of South Carolina; Steven Semken, Arizona State University-Tempe; Rachel Teasdale, California State University-Chico.