MGDS education components focus primarily on the creation of educational material, on-line educational resources, and participation in workshops for educators. The educational material covers a range of content and approaches involving the use of geoscience research data in education.
- MARGINS mini-lessons are teacher-ready, undergraduate-level modules developed through the MARGINS program and designed to expose undergraduate students to a range of MARGINS data and data resources. The MARGINS mini-lessons project is funded through an NSF CCLI award.
- GeoMapApp Learning Activities are data-driven self-contained learning modules aimed at the middle- and high-school, Community College and introductory university levels. Using a guided-inquiry approach, each activity contains a student handout and answer sheet, an annotated teacher edition (with answers) and quizzes aligned with NY State Regents exams. The modules cover a range of topics including seafloor spreading, hotspot ages, the rules of contouring, and landscape-geology relationships. They allwo students to explore research-grade data in a map-based setting.
- Geoscience "Data Puzzles" are data-using activities that purposefully present a low barrier-to-entry for teachers and a high ratio of insight-to-effort for students. They allow a teaching style in which students use geoscience research data to solve problems and answer questions. Tips help teachers anticipate student misconceptions and overcome common challenges in teaching this material.
- The Earth Exploration Toolbook (EET) is a collection of computer-based geoscience activities. Each EET activity (chapter) introduces data sets and analysis tools that enables users to explore some aspect of the Earth system. View the GeoMapApp EET chapter on seafloor topography. View the Virtual Ocean EET chapter on using IODP sediment cores and CHRONOS data to examine the climate history.
- Conceptests are single-topic multiple choice questions given in the middle of a lecture to assess students' learning of basic concepts. Students answer the question first individually and then after discussion with their neighbours. Benefits include better engagement of students, students more focused on concepts, better pacing by teachers, improved class attendance, and superior learning overall.
- On-line tutorials are available to help teach researchers, teachers and students use our data access tools.
- On-line webinar highlighting the use of GeoMapApp in the classroom.
- On-line webinars targetted at GeoMapApp use within the Polar and GeoPRISMS communities.
- The MGDS MediaBank contains highlight images, videos, maps and illustrations suitable for use by educators at all levels. Image galleries can be browsed freely, and full-resolution images can be requested.
MGDS team members participate in education and outreach workshops organised for educators, and reports on those activities are made to our Advisory Commimttee.
- Hands-on GeoMapApp workshops for educators were held at the annual meetings of the National Science Teacher Association (NSTA, 2013), the NSTA STEM Forum and Expo (2012, 2013), and the National Earth Science Teacher Association (2013), as well as at annual meetings of the earth science teacher associations for the states of New York (2012), New Jersey (2013) and Connecticut (2012).
- Teacher professional development GeoMapApp workshops were held at Lamont in 2011 and 2012 and at California University of Pennsylvania in 2011.
- An AGU Geophysical Information For Teachers (GIFT) Workshop, in December 2012, attracted almost 50 high-achieving teachers from across the nation. They were introduced to GeoMapApp Learning Activities, with the teachers working through two of the learning modules and providing feedback on their use in their own classrooms.
- The first MARGINS Education Mini-Workshop, held in April 2007, was designed to create undergraduate-level "mini-lessons" that would engage undergraduate students in scientific research, by using real examples and materials that reflect the diversity of tools and data resources used to solve geological problems. This workshop highlighted the integration of diverse earth science datasets from different sources through the use of GeoMapApp and MGDS search tools.
- A second MARGINS mini-lesson workshop in which many new learning activities were created was held in May, 2009.
- Regular participation (2006-2013) in Earth2Class teacher workshops focussed on GeoMapApp and its use in the K-12 classroom.
- GeoMapApp-focussed oral and poster presentations have been given regularly in targetted AGU Fall Meeting education (ED) sessions.
- Reports on education components to the MGDS Advisory Committee are available for 2005 and 2006.
Studies on student use of data visualizations shows that students often fail to perceive the essential information that experts or teachers had in mind when creating or presenting the visualizations. Sandra Swenson conducted research to establish how students in grades 8-12 interpret a common visualization of a global digital elevation model. The full results of that study can be read here.
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