Geoscience Education Research (GER) Community Synthesis and Planning

The NSF-funded Geoscience Education Research (GER) Community Synthesis and Planning Project aims to advance a synthesis of GER and prioritize geoscience education research needs via community input. The three objectives supporting this project goal are:

1. To synthesize the results of GER by documenting the evolution and findings of GER in a wide range of topical areas, identifying the strengths and limitations of GER findings, and making recommendations for future research.
2. To identify, refine, and prioritize the needs of the GER community.
3. To support current and future geoscience education researchers by offering forums for discussion and resources for their use.

Activities of the project include digitization of past issues of the Journal of Geoscience Education, a GER workshop at the 2016 Earth Educators' Rendezvous, a survey of GER community needs, a webinar to share and discuss survey findings, and development of online resources on GER methods. The project responds to recent calls for action to strengthen the GER community of practice (Lukes et al., 2015) and to better support geoscience education researcher needs (Feig, 2014). It connects to recent efforts to elevate and understand discipline-based educations research (DBER; Singer et al., 2012); and builds directly on outcomes from the NSF-funded Shaping the Future of Geoscience Education Research (GER) Project. These outcomes are described in the following section.

GER Community Survey

As part of identifying, refining, and prioritizing the needs of the GER community, geoscience education researchers and practitioners were invited to participate in a GER Community Survey. This survey was built upon findings from the 2015 EER workshop on geoscience education research as well as a 2014 GER survey completed by members of NAGT's GER Division. Community members were invited to complete the survey to review, comment on, and prioritize the needs identified by these previous efforts to set the stage for moving forward on fulfilling these community needs. The results of this survey will be shared in a Spring webinar and at the 2016 EER Workshop; they will serve to jump-start discussions and working group activities.

This survey is now closed.

Webinar

Ahead of the workshop at the Rendezvous, there was a webinar to engage the community in what the community survey and previous years' work on GER issues had to say about the needs to the community. This webinar helped to shape the work at the 2016 workshop by fleshing out the scope of different aspects of the online resource "toolbox" that was developed.

Workshop at 2016 Earth Educators' Rendezvous

The Geoscience Education Research (GER) Community Planning workshop at the 2016 Earth Educators' Rendezvous served as a forum for discussion by the GER community on what is most needed to support current and future geoscience education researchers. The workshop aimed to engage the GER community in activities that will foster synthesis, prioritization, collaboration, and resources development for the discipline.

This workshop has already occurred.