Recruiting undergraduate students to geoscience majors in Tennessee is severely hampered by the fact that most Tennessee high schools do not offer a geoscience class. As a result, students tend to graduate high school and enter college with no real idea that geoscience is a potential major. Project ICE-AGE will engage with high school students by exposing them to the geosciences in the context of core science classes. First, a series of "Lessons-In-A-Box" will be designed to meet state educational standards in the core sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics, but drawn explicitly from interdisciplinary geoscience fields. These lessons will be tested with visiting school groups at a campus museum, introduced to area teachers through workshops and educational conferences, and circulated by the Knox County Public Library System. Second, the PIs will collaborate with three groups of high school students, including two that consist primarily of underrepresented minorities, on authentic scientific research. This work expands a project with one high school that has resulted in participation of students in writing a peer-reviewed paper, and four student-led presentations at regional and national scientific meetings. Finally, PIs will create two new classes for future teachers in culturally responsive geoscience education and research methods in science. Taken together, PIs expect to introduce area high school students and future teachers to the geosciences in such a way as to enhance their required learning objectives and expose them to the potential for further study and employment in geology and related fields.
Part 2 The project proposes to develop and deploy an integrated set of programs that will engage high school students along a spectrum from one-day lessons that will contact large numbers of students, to intensive, year-long research projects that will involve a smaller number of students. PIs will also train pre-service STEM teachers in the use of active learning techniques using geological concepts. PIs will specifically work with high school populations that are enriched in underrepresented minorities, in order to address the low diversity of current geoscience students and practitioners. PIs will actively promote these programs to teachers around the country via teachers' workshops, STEM education conferences, and professional geoscience conferences. Finally, this project will produce scholarship in the fields of education and geoscience. PIs expect that these efforts will expose ~165 high school students to authentic geoscience research and at least 1000 students to Lessons-In-A-Box. The project will also help to train ~90 pre-service teachers, 6 graduate students, and 1 undergraduate in teaching geoscience and generating culturally responsive lesson plans. This project will also lead to closer collaboration between faculty in the University of Tennessee's Departments of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education, and Earth and Planetary Sciences. In the long term these collaborations will help EPS faculty to improve teaching techniques for undergraduates and to train more pre-service teachers in geoscience.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
