Earth Science

Today’s students are exposed to news about wildfires on an all-too-regular basis. An increasingly larger portion of those students live in areas where wildfire risks are high or where smoke has reduced the air quality. The GeoHazard project has designed, developed, and tested an online wildfire curriculum module for middle and high school students that addresses the factors that influence wildfires, as well as the risks and impacts that wildfires bring to people and their communities.

Climate change, and the rise of the natural hazards that climate change brings, has been at the top of news feeds every week over the past year. Extreme events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires are expected to increase in the future. What does that mean for those of us living in the path of one of these hazards? Our GeoHazard project is exploring this question with middle and high school teachers and students across the country.

Understanding Earth’s tectonic plate system dynamics is complicated though it is the central paradigm to explain transformations of Earth’s surface. The landforms and geodynamic events resulting from plates interacting are too massive to observe at scales of human experience. It is difficult for students to connect plate movements to geologic features like the Andes Mountains and geodynamic events like earthquakes. As such, the conventional teaching of plate tectonics rarely involves student-led systematic explorations.

Our planet’s surface is in constant motion. Large pieces of Earth’s crust and upper mantle, known as tectonic plates, continually move toward and away from each other at a rate of millimeters to centimeters each year. Over geologic time, their relative motions determine everything from the types of boundaries they form to the distribution of rocks and landforms on Earth’s surface and the location and frequency of earthquake and volcanic eruptions.

Pallant, A., Lord, T., Pryputniewicz, S., & McDonald, S. (2022). Models for developing explanations of earth's dynamic plate system. Science Scope, 45(4), 20-28.

High-quality science education is essential for students to become scientifically literate. Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagrams and build-a-MEL (baMEL) diagrams are instructional scaffolds that create an opportunity for students to build scientific understanding through the evaluation of the connections between evidence and alternative explanations of a scientific phenomenon. The MELs and baMELs allow for a natural incorporation of three-dimensional learning that has been recommended by the Next Generation Science Standards to enhance students’ comprehension.

The origin of the Universe is something that people have pondered for thousands of years. As evidence has mounted, the Big Bang theory has become the consensus scientific model. Much of this same evidence refutes opposing theories such as the earlier Steady State model. The NGSS for high school includes the nature of and evidence for the Big Bang, providing a rich opportunity to explore—with the help of a scaffold—the connections between evidence and competing models about the origins of the Universe.

Bhattacharya, D., Chandler, M., Carroll-Steward, K., & Forbes, C.T. (2020). Using climate models to learn about global climate change. The Science Teacher, 88(1), 58-66.

Bhattacharya, D., Chandler, M., Carroll-Steward, K., & Forbes, C.T. (2020). Using climate models to learn about global climate change. The Science Teacher, 88(1), 58-66.

Developing understanding about the Earth’s climate and the phenomenon of global climate change (GCC) is essential for all students, our future citizens and decision-makers. Recent implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) has intensified the focus on teaching and learning of the Earth’s climate and GCC in formal learning environments. Concurrently, the empirical research associated with climate education has also increased.