A Framework for Transformative Geoscience Education Research

A Framework for Transformative Geoscience Education Research is an NSF-funded, one-year project to identify ambitious goals for geoscience education research that will be achievable within ten years and will have significant impact on geoscience education teaching and learning. The three objectives supporting this project goal are:

1. To identify themes that span multiple GER topical areas.
2. To identify grand challenges in GER for each of the broad themes that are of high interest to the geoscience education researcher and practitioner community.
3. To develop and prioritize strategies to address the grand challenges that the community judges to provide the strongest opportunities for rapid achievement of transformative GER.

Activities of the proposed project will include a survey to gather broad community input, a webinar for community members to review the results of that survey, a focused workshop of geoscience education researchers with thematic expertise, and the writing of a white paper. The project responds to recommendations in the discipline-based educations research report (DBER; Singer et al., 2012) and in Lewis and Baker (2010), and builds directly on outcomes from the NSF-funded 2015 Shaping the Future of Geoscience Education Research (GER) project, and the 2016 Geoscience Education Research (GER) Community Synthesis and Planning project.

Community Survey: Initial Ideas on GER Grand Challenges

In order to identify grand challenges in GER for each of the broad themes that are of high interest to the geoscience education researcher and practitioner community, the project invited input from the GER and practitioner community via a online survey. The survey asked the community to select one theme and comment on what they saw as important research questions to address in that field in the next 10 years, as well as what opportunities there are to address it and what resources it would take. The project leaders will compile the results from the survey and share them with the community via the webinar below. Both webinar and survey data will become resources that inform the workshop at the 2017 Earth Educators' Rendezvous.

The survey is now closed. Watch for the results to be made available in late spring or early summer.

Webinar

Ahead of the workshop at the Rendezvous, there will be a webinar to engage the community in what the community survey and previous years' work on GER issues have to say about the grand challenges and geoscience education research agenda.

Workshop at 2017 Earth Educators' Rendezvous

The Geoscience Education Research Grand Challenges and Strategies Workshop at the 2017 Earth Educators' Rendezvous will serve as a forum in which to develop the grand challenges in terms of research questions. Working groups for each of the topical areas will use pre-workshop survey findings, outcomes from the Summit on Undergraduate Geoscience Education, http://www.jsg.utexas.edu/events/future-of-geoscience-undergraduate-education/, and shared outcomes from by the developing JGE GER theme issue to define/articulate the challenges. Working groups will be charged to define ~3-5 grand challenges [research questions] for their theme.