Collaborative Research: Geoscience Animation: Construction, Evaluation, and Modification of Plate Tectonic Concepts for Geosciences Education

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Undergraduate geoscience students learn better if provided with high-quality, accurate animations of important Earth processes. This project will generate, assess, and disseminate a set of new animations about fundamental tectonic processes such as continental rifting, continental collision, transform faulting, and planetary tectonics. The animations will be tested in classrooms at the collaborating institutions and will be made available to major science media outlets like Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and History Channel, in order to aid them in generating better documentaries on fundamental Earth processes. The final animations will be highly useful in many high school and undergraduate classrooms since most introductory geoscience courses begin with lectures on Plate Tectonics. These animations could provide an important improvement in student understanding of fundamental earth processes that often have a significant impact on society. This project will provide scientifically-vetted and field-tested animations that will illustrate the concept of 'Plate Tectonics' in the three-dimensional space that is required for students to comprehend processes and interpret geologic history successfully. The work is supported by literature on visual learning styles, and these concepts are incorporated into the assessments. The evaluation methods will capture misconceptions as part of the formative assessment, which is critical to developing model animations for release to the general public, as well as undergraduate students. The project involves a rich collaboration across disciplines (art, geosciences and communications) and will systematically test several learning hypotheses in classroom environments of three campuses (University of Texas Dallas, Richland Community College, Richardson, TX and the University of South Florida) that typically serve underrepresented communities.