Exploring How Geoscience Inquiry Labs Influence Graduate Student Teaching Beliefs and Undergraduate Student Learning and Interest

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With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest by improving the undergraduate geoscience curriculum and producing future faculty who are more effective educators. Inquiry-based teaching is an effective way to model the scientific process. However, published geoscience lab manuals often contain few inquiry-based exercises. Such lab manuals suggest that learning occurs by following an instructor's directions. Faculty who believe that following directions is a good pathway to learning are less likely to adopt techniques, such as inquiry, that research has demonstrated to better support student learning. Since teaching assistants are still developing their teaching beliefs, we hypothesize that teaching assistants who have more experience teaching inquiry-based labs will develop more student-centered beliefs, enhancing their effectiveness as future faculty. This project will create a suite of inquiry labs for introductory geoscience courses and study their effect on teaching assistant beliefs at five institutions over two years. This research will determine the relative effects of inquiry experiences, teaching assistant's teaching beliefs, and undergraduate student interest on student learning outcomes of approximately 1500 undergraduate students. This project's significance lies in its work to provide more effective instructional materials for geoscience students and its potential to reveal a new pathway for transforming STEM education.This project will apply the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) to test the hypothesis that involving teaching assistants in teaching inquiry labs will increase their student-centered teaching beliefs, as measured by the Teacher Beliefs Interview (Luft & Roehrig, 2007). Hierarchical linear modeling will explore the proportion of influence that teaching assistant beliefs, the inquiry level of the lab, and student interest have on conceptual, geoscientific learning. Labs developed by the project will be made available using the Teach the Earth website. As a result, the project has the potential to increase adoption of inquiry-based geoscience labs across the nation. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.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.