GP-IMPACT: ICE-AGE: Integrating Continuous Experiential Activities for Geoscience Education

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Part 1Recruiting undergraduate students to geoscience majors inTennessee is severely hampered by the fact that most Tennessee high schools do not offera geoscience class. As a result, students tend to graduate high school and enter collegewith no real idea that geoscience is a potential major. Project ICE-AGE will engage withhigh school students by exposing them to the geosciences in the context of core scienceclasses. First, a series of "Lessons-In-A-Box" will be designed to meet stateeducational standards in the core sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics, but drawnexplicitly from interdisciplinary geoscience fields. These lessons will be tested withvisiting school groups at a campus museum, introduced to area teachers throughworkshops and educational conferences, and circulated by the Knox County PublicLibrary System. Second, the PIs will collaborate with three groups of high school students,including two that consist primarily of underrepresented minorities, on authenticscientific research. This work expands a project with one high school that has resulted inparticipation of students in writing a peer-reviewed paper, and four student-ledpresentations at regional and national scientific meetings. Finally, PIs will create two newclasses for future teachers in culturally responsive geoscience education and researchmethods in science. Taken together, PIs expect to introduce area high school students andfuture teachers to the geosciences in such a way as to enhance their required learningobjectives and expose them to the potential for further study and employment in geologyand related fields.Part 2The project proposes to develop and deploy an integrated set ofprograms that will engage high school students along a spectrum from one-day lessonsthat will contact large numbers of students, to intensive, year-long research projects thatwill involve a smaller number of students. PIs will also train pre-service STEM teachersin the use of active learning techniques using geological concepts. PIs will specificallywork with high school populations that are enriched in underrepresented minorities, inorder to address the low diversity of current geoscience students and practitioners. PIswill 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 authenticgeoscience research and at least 1000 students to Lessons-In-A-Box. The project will also help totrain ~90 pre-service teachers, 6 graduate students, and 1 undergraduate in teachinggeoscience and generating culturally responsive lesson plans. This project will also leadto closer collaboration between faculty in the University of Tennessee's Departments ofTheory and Practice in Teacher Education, and Earth and Planetary Sciences. In the longterm these collaborations will help EPS faculty to improve teaching techniques forundergraduates 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.