Over 2200 faculty responded to the survey which was conducted by the American Institute of Physics. The NAGT professional development program "On the Cutting Edge" recently surveyed 7000 geoscience faculty in the United States to develop a snapshot of current instructional practices in undergraduate geoscience courses, faculty strategies for learning new content and new teaching approaches, and faculty involvement in the geoscience education community.
Instructional Practices in Introductory Geoscience Courses: Results of a National Faculty Survey We direct faculty to three portions of the web resource: Teaching Quantitative Literacy, QL activities, and the 2006 workshop website In order to help faculty increase the QL of geoscience students, a community-built faculty-centered web resource (Teaching Quantitative Skills in the Geosciences houses multiple examples that implement the five best practices of QL throughout the geoscience curriculum. Novel ways to infuse QL into geoscience classrooms include use of web-based resources, shadow courses, setting clear expectations, and promoting quantitative geoscience to the general public. Faculty who wish to include quantitative content must use creative means to break down barriers of public perception of geoscience as qualitative, administrative worry that enrollments will drop and faculty resistance to change. However, the inclusion of QL in introductory courses is often met with resistance at all levels. We discuss the pedagogical underpinnings of these five ideas and illustrate some ways that the geosciences represent ideal places to use these techniques. These five ideas include techniques such as: place mathematical concepts in context, use multiple representations, use technology appropriately, work in groups, and do multiple-day, in-depth problems that place quantitative skills in multiple contexts. Using some best practices from the mathematics education community surrounding problem solving, calculus reform, pre-college mathematics and five geoscience/math workshops, geoscience and mathematics faculty have identified five pedagogical ideas to increase the QL of the students who populate introductory geoscience courses. The geosciences provide meaningful context for a number of fundamental mathematical concepts that are revisited several times in a single course. The Case for Infusing Quantitative Literacy into Introductory Geoscience Coursesĭirectory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)įull Text Available We present the case for introductory geoscience courses as model venues for increasing the quantitative literacy (QL of large numbers of the college-educated population.
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