Keeping Geology Alive: January 2015

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Bringing the Coral to the Classroom

Guest blog post by Logan Brenner (lbrenner@ldeo.columbia.edu)

I love the ocean and everything about it, from the isolated atolls down to the creepy deepsea anglerfish and back up again to the coral reefs. But those distant ecosystems don’t appeal to everyone. However, just because something is geographically far removed doesn’t mean that it isn’t important. As a graduate student studying ocean science and climate change, I want to use my research to share the importance of the reef system and how scientists can use corals as tools to learn about the past.

I developed a quick, easy, and inexpensive experiment to help younger students learn how paleoceanographers core and analyze corals. The goals of this project are to introduce students to ocean studies and to teach, albeit in a slightly abstract way, how to conduct fieldwork. The main goal, however, is to take what maybe a completely unfamiliar part of the world, a coral reef, and learn in a hands on fashion without having to go to the ocean. This project was originally created for an open house setting where students were passing through, but could easily be adapted for the classroom.

As I said this project is inexpensive and only requires:

-- A clear/glass casserole dish,

-- Cut bubble tea straws,

-- Two colors of art dough,

-- A pen,

-- Confetti,

-- Paper cut outs of corals,

-- tape

Instructions for Set Up:

-- Layer the dough in the casserole, alternative colors. This represents banding in stony corals

-- Pour confetti on the top layer to represent the tissue layer

-- Tape the paper cut outs to the casserole dish to make a lively coral reef

Project Procedure for Participants:

-- Choose a bubble tea straw

-- Place the straw on top of the tissue layer

-- Press the straw straight down to the bottom of the casserole

-- Slowly pull the straw straight up

-- Use a capped pen to push the coral core out

Analysis Questions:

-- What could the different colors represent? (annual couplets, different seasons)

-- Why the layers different sizes? (represents different lengths of time)

-- Why do the layers get tilted? (grew that way or perhaps from coral core removal)

Please contact me at lbrenner@ldeo.columbia.edu with any questions.

Happy Coring!

Logan Brenner

Check out Logan's blog at:

ScienceofLogan.com

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Learning Through Teaching and Metacognition

When switching disciplines, one of the hardest tasks is gaining the background knowledge necessary to be successful. This is especially the case if you're no longer a student or have no access to the classes that you need. Fortunately, there are many ways to counter that and learn what you need. One method that is often overlooked is teaching, both formally in a classroom or informally through outreach or just talking with family and friends.

In order to successfully teach, you must have a solid understanding of the topic yourself. Having a thorough understanding of a topic means that you have multiple ways to think about or explain it. When faced with a question from your student, an inability to answer the question, or to answer it satisfactorily, can be a good indication that you need to improve your understanding. This is perhaps the most obvious way to learn from teaching, but there are more subtle ways as well.

A great method for anyone, teacher or student, to learn is metacognition - essentially, thinking about thinking. Metacognition is commonly used by teachers to help determine why a student is struggling or having difficulty with a concept or assignment. We ask questions such as "how did you come to this conclusion?" or "why did you choose that method?" to gather information about how the student is thinking. This method, however, is often overlooked when it's the teacher who wants to learn from the students. Asking these questions to the best, most successful students can provide the teacher with new ideas and new ways of thinking about the topic, thereby increasing the teacher's own understanding.

To get started with metacognition, you first need to learn the correct types of questions to ask. While some questions are useful for drawing out thinking patterns, other questions only probe knowledge of facts. So-called Socratic questions are very good at pulling out the types of information desired by metacognition. Before using them for teaching, you might try using them on yourself. How do you think?

References:

Promoting Student Metacognition by Kimberly D. Tanner
Socratic Questioning by David Straker

Friday, January 16, 2015

Using Low Cost Environmental Sensors in Geoscience Education

Sensors and microcontrollers and coming down in price thanks to mass production and advances in process technology. This means that it is now incredibly cheap to collect both education and research grade data. Combine this with the emergence of the "Internet of Things" (IoT), and it makes an ideal setup for educators and scientists. To demonstrate this, we setup a small three-axis magnetometer to measure the Earth's magnetic field and connected it to the internet through data.sparkfun.com. I really think that involving students in the data collection process is important. Not only do they realize that instruments aren't black boxes, that errors are real, and that data is messy, but they become attached to the data. When a student collects the data themselves, they are much more likely to explore and be involved with it than if the instructor hands them a "pre-built" data set. For more information, watch the 5-minute talk (screencast below) and checkout the links is the resources section. As always, email, comments, etc are welcome and encouraged!

Monday, January 12, 2015

What do you get when you mix Mentos, Diet Coke, and second graders? Future scientists!

Guest blog post by Tess Caswell (tess_caswell@brown.edu)

One of the best parts about being a graduate student is that you have a bit of flexibility in your schedule (even if you do work long hours!) which means that it’s not too hard to spend the occasional hour or two volunteering. Here at Brown we put some of our free time into a fun and productive activity: teaching earth science to elementary school students!

The partnership started in 2005, when students at Brown learned that science had been removed from the local public schools’ second grade curriculum. Brown graduate students then teamed up with teachers at local Vartan Gregorian Elementary School to give these kids the basic science education that they needed and deserved. Over time, science has been reintegrated into the curriculum but our lessons live on. We’ve developed a suite of hands-on activities that can be used to teach kids, and we hope that you use them!

At the link below, you’ll find lesson plans and handouts for a suite of basic science topics. The lessons follow the sequence of science topics in the Providence Public Schools’ curriculum, but are also linked to the Next Generation Science Standards for crosscutting concepts. All of the lessons use the Scientific Method as their foundation and, of course, each involves an experiment! They are structured to include a “Research” section in which the volunteers teach the students the basics of the topic, a “Hypothesis” section where the kids synthesize their own ideas about what will happen during the experiment, and a “Results” section where the students record their observations and describe whether their hypothesis was correct. The handouts include space for the students to write and draw – and have been vetted by our second grade teacher, Ms. Robinson.

Take a look at the lesson plans and see if there are any you can use. And, of course, please contact us if you have any questions!

You can find the lesson plans here:

https://sites.google.com/a/brown.edu/vartan-gregorian/home/lesson-plan-compilation---public

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Collaboration across disciplines: Its not rocket science

Guest blog post by Andrea Basche (abasche@iastate.edu)

In the AGU student pop-ups, I most appreciated the opportunity to share my experiences executing collaborative research projects with fellow graduate student colleagues. My PhD work is part of a large, USDA-funded initiative investigating climate change in Midwest agriculture. We have lots of folks involved - from agronomists like myself, to economists, to entomologists to sociologists. It was a little daunting at first for some of us students to figure out where we "fit" in and how we "do" this transdisciplinary work. I like the word "collaborative" vs. transdisicplinary because it sounds less "boxy" - and we're good at putting ourselves into academic boxes, aren't we!

As I discussed in my pop-up talk, I don't think any of this collaborative work is rocket science. Basically as students we took some time to develop relationships, get to know each other and learn more about what each other studies and researches. Then we reflected as a cohort on our shared experiences, and over time put together a roadmap outlining opportunities for collaboration on the project as well as a short perspective paper featured in the Nov/Dec 2014 issue of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. In the paper we discuss the idea that scientists who want to engage in collaborative work benefit from additional skills training - communication, leadership, interpersonal/group dynamics, project management, etc. etc. Graduate education may need to do some critical reflection and incorporate some of these skills into training programs, if we are serious as a society about tackling the wicked problems facing our planet.

We also believe that keeping the cohort together is key! As students evolving in our educations in an increasingly collaborative environment, it will be important to learn from collective challenges and successes.

The 2014 cohort of graduate students from the Climate and Sustainable Corn-Based Cropping Systems Coordinated Agriculture Project (sustainablecorn.org) strike a pose for the camera. Students research a diverse range of topics including agronomy, sociology, entomology, agricultural education, weed science, agricultural engineering and climate science. Photo credit Maggie McGinty.