This collaborative project is bringing high-priority science results and data from the NSF-funded MARGINS program, an interdisciplinary study of the processes and evolution of continental margins, into undergraduate geoscience courses. The project team, comprising experts in continental-margin research and geoscience education, is working with a user community to create, assess and disseminate a coherent set of modular mini-lessons and course segments for upper-division courses that engage students with cutting-edge findings on rupturing continental lithosphere, subduction processes, seismogenesis, and sediment dispersal from sources to sinks.
The Intellectual Merit of this project lies in the integration of research and education by transforming high-quality MARGINS science into educational resources for undergraduate classrooms. The Broader Impacts of this project lie in the multi-institutional effort to disseminate MARGINS science, offering scientists a powerful means of increasing the impact of their own research, while creating portable curricular resources to educate and engage geoscience students across a range of courses and institutional types.
The goal of this collaborative science education research project was to bring high-priority science results and data from the NSF-funded MARGINS program into undergraduate geoscience courses, in the form of research based Mini-Lessons. NSF MARGINS was a ten-year interdisciplinary research effort funded by the National Science Foundation to study the geologic processes and tectonic evolution of continental margins, involving dozens of research investigations at multiple global focus sites across four primary research initiatives: Rupturing Continental Lithosphere (RCL), Subduction Factory (SubFac), Seismogenic Zone Experiment (SEIZE), and Source to Sink (S2S). The mini-lesson project team, comprised of experts in continental-margins research and geoscience education, worked with a user community to create, assess and disseminate a coherent set of modular mini-lessons and course segments for upper division geoscience courses that engage students with cutting-edge findings on continental rifting, subduction processes, seismogenesis, and sediment dispersal from sources to sinks. The Intellectual Merit of this project lies in the integration of research and education by transforming high-quality MARGINS science into educational resources for undergraduate classrooms. The Broader Impacts of this project lie in the multi-institutional effort to disseminate MARGINS science, offering scientists a powerful means of increasing the impact of their own research, while creating portable curricular resources to educate and engage geoscience students across a range of courses and institutional types.
