EMES Colloquium Seminar Speaker – Dr. Megan Plenge

Many geoscience departments face declining numbers of majors and reduced administrative or financial support despite the continuing need for a skilled geoscience workforce. To meet this need, departments must engage students in introductory courses and retain majors through quantitatively rigorous upper-division courses to prepare them for geoscience careers. Research-based best practices for student engagement, retention and content acquisition include student-centered instructional design that faculty members may lack the time or expertise to adopt.

This presentation highlights projects that build faculty capacity through professional development, creation and dissemination of curricular materials, and supporting geoscience education research (GER).

The Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH) is developing curricula that introduce non-majors to interdisciplinary perspectives on cascading land-surface hazards and prepare upper-division students for cascading hazards research. Introductory materials include adaptable, student-centered activities that educators can easily adapt for integration into their courses.

Pedagogical professional development can prepare instructors to use student-centered practices. Many geoscience instructors lack formal education training and may default to the methods through which they were taught rather than research-based practices. In partnership with the Geoscience Education Research Group at the University of Ghana, we developed geoscience education curricula at the 200 and 400 level to provide undergraduates the opportunity to learn research-based instructional practices during their degree programs. In addition, professional development workshops for geoscience faculty, graduate students, and Ministry of Education officials highlighted geoscience education and best practices.

GER informs both faculty development and curricular design by identifying effective classroom practices and evaluating their effects on students’ knowledge, values, interest, and disciplinary identity. This presentation focuses on two GER projects. One study examining how a role-playing classroom intervention influenced students’ geoscience identity. The second study investigates the longitudinal effects of a professional development program that supported departments in program-level visioning and curriculum mapping. Challenges identified in interviews and surveys support the need to increase departmental visibility and enrollment.