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Spatial ability is required by practitioners and students of structural geology and so, considering spatial skills in the context of cognitive science has the potential to improve structural geology teaching and practice. Spatial thinking skills may be organized using three dichotomies, which can be linked to structural geology practice. First, a distinction is made between separating (attending to part of a whole) and combining (linking together aspects of the whole). While everyone has a basic ability to separate and combine, experts attend to differences guided by experiences of rock properties in context. Second, a distinction is made between seeing the relations among multiple objects as separate items or the relations within a single object with multiple parts. Experts can flexibly consider relations among or between objects to optimally reason about different types of spatial problems. Third, a distinction is made between reasoning about stationary and moving objects. Experts recognize static configurations that encode a movement history, and create mental models of the processes that led to the static state. The observations and inferences made by a geologist leading a field trip are compared with the corresponding observations and inferences made by a cognitive psychologist interested in spatial learning. The presented framework provides a vocabulary for discussing spatial skills both within and between the fields of structural geology and cognitive psychology.

Educators seek to develop 21st century skills in the classroom by incorporating educational materials other than textbooks into their lessons, such as digitally available activities, videos, and vi...

Geoscience instructors and textbooks rely on analogy for teaching students a wide range of content, from the most basic concepts to highly complicated systems. The goal of this paper is to connect ...

The authors explore how the portal of a digital library can be designed to influence the behavior of its users. The example is the Starting Point Digital Library, an education digital library designed primarily for faculty teaching introductory level geoscience. The specific goal of the Starting Point library is to increase faculty knowledge of the full range of teaching methods that can be used in their classes so that they will be better positioned to design and implement introductory geoscience courses that support student learning. Our design is based on an in-depth look at how geoscience faculty think about and prepare for teaching developed through one-on-one interviews with a small sample of geoscience faculty

As digital libraries (DLs) continue to mature into complex networked information and knowledge tools, and become accessible to ever more diverse groups of users, library implementation and use are emerging as important research problems. How might we understand the ways in which the current generation of DLs have been designed and are used in real-life contexts today, and how might we apply our understandings to future generations of DL design?

The geosciences have an important role to play in addressing whether humans can live sustainably on Earth. From water to energy, from climate change to natural hazards, geoscience is central to solving a wide range of problems.

Producing a workforce that will be successful in meeting global environmental and resource challenges requires that we attract diverse students into the geosciences, support them fully in our programs, and assist them as they move into the profession. However, geoscience has the lowest ethnic and racial diversity of any of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (National Science Foundation (NSF), “Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering,” http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/2013/start.cfm) and is often viewed as a difficult choice for students with physical disabilities.

As the focus on developing our nation's scientific workforce intensifies [National Academy of Sciences, 2007], more geoscience departments are recognizing teacher preparation as an integral part of their work. Skilled geoscience teachers can excite and engage K–12 students in the geosciences, present geoscience as a rewarding career path, and ultimately contribute to a better understanding of key geoscience problems among the public. Our ability to achieve these goals starts with the quality of our teacher education programs.

Teaching quantitative skills is one of the most challenging and important aspects of teaching geoscience. Quantitative skills are essential for Earth science students and citizens alike, and these skills have been deemed a critical goal for U.S. undergraduate education [National Science Foundation, 1996]. Public policy decisions increasingly are made and explained to the public based on data presentation, numerical models, statistics, and numbers. Introductory Earth sciences are among the primary courses chosen by nonscience students to fulfill science requirements and thus provide an important vehicle for teaching these essential skills. Courses in the geoscience major are equally important in introducing students to the quantitative analysis that is increasingly central to the discipline. It is therefore essential that adequate training be provided to Earth science majors and nonmajors in quantitative techniques ranging from simple graph and data interpretation to more sophisticated techniques such as numerical modeling.

Students are key to the future of the Earth and space sciences and to the vitality of our global AGU community. More than 7300 students are now members of the Union (17% of the total membership); of these, 30% live outside the U.S. Equally important, student attendance at AGU's major meetings has been steadily climbing. In 2004, a remarkable 25% of the registrants for major AGU meetings were students. An increasing number of qualified students apply for travel grants to attend these meetings. Yet, only 5% (see Figure 1) receive these modest grants of $300–$650 because Union resources have not kept pace with demand. More students need financial aid, and our charge is to “find” the funds to help them.