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

如果向本科地球科学学生提供高质量、准确的地球重要过程动画，他们会学得更好。该项目将生成、评估和传播一组关于基本构造过程的新动画，如大陆裂谷、大陆碰撞、转换断层或行星构造。这些动画将在合作机构的教室里进行测试，并将提供给主要的科学媒体，如探索频道、国家地理频道和历史频道，以帮助他们制作更好的关于地球基本过程的纪录片。最后的动画将在许多课堂（高中和本科）中非常有用，因为大多数地球科学入门课程都以板块构造论开始，并且可以为学生对通常对社会有重大影响的基本地球过程的理解提供重要的改进。该项目将提供经过科学审查和实地测试的动画，这些动画将在三维空间中说明“板块构造”的概念，这是学生成功理解过程和解释地质历史所必需的。这项工作得到了关于视觉学习风格的文献的支持，这些概念被纳入评估。评估方法将捕捉误解，作为形成性评估的一部分，这对于开发面向公众和本科生发布的模型动画至关重要。该项目涉及跨学科（艺术，地球科学和通信）的丰富合作，并将在三个校区（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校，里奇兰社区学院，理查德森，德克萨斯州和南佛罗里达大学）的课堂环境中系统地测试几种学习假设，这些校区通常服务于代表性不足的社区。

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, or 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 classrooms (high school and undergraduate) since most introductory geoscience courses begin with lectures on Plate Tectonics and 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.