| NSF Org: |
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | May 9, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | May 9, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 1712495 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Keith Sverdrup
ksverdru@nsf.gov (703)292-4671 DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | May 15, 2017 |
| End Date: | April 30, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $139,999.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $139,999.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
800 WEST CAMPBELL RD. RICHARDSON TX US 75080-3021 (972)883-2313 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
TX US 75083-0688 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | IUSE |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
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.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This grant allowed us to explore new ways to present basic geoscience concepts to two different groups of university students using videos that UTD students under the supervision of Professor Stern created for this purpose. Upper division (juniors and seniors) geoscience majors know much more about the geosciences than do lower division (freshman and sophomore) students, so the same concepts need to be presented differently to the two groups. This NSF grant allowed us to explore how to best do this, using the important plate tectonic process of continental rifting and formation of new oceans and passive continental margins as the topic. We developed separate videos for these two different audiences. We began by making the upper division video, which is about 10 minutes long and can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6oJKsSiLEI . We showed this video to experts in the field and asked for their opinion about scientific content. Professor Ryan and USF students assessed the educational effectiveness of this video for the upper division audience. Then we modified this video for lower division students by first canvassing 5 introductory geology textbooks to see how this topic was presented. We used this information to modify the lower division video to be aligned with textbook presentations. The 7 minute long lower division video can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQqrfIVkctM&t=8s . The educational effectiveness of this video for the lower division audience is now being assessed by Prof. Ryan at USF.
An additional benefit of this grant was that it encouraged us to expand the UTD video-making activities, including making GeoNews videos for the public and working with middle school educators to better explain plate tectonics to their students. Our videos are posted on our YouTube channel “UTD Geoscience Studio”, which as of Aug. 2020 has ~1130 subscribers and ~117,000 views. Prof. Stern is yearly teaching a undergraduate elective upper division geoscience class that teaches students how to make short geoscience videos. We also are offering short courses at regional geoscientific meetings to teach others geoscientists to make their own Geoscience videos for use in the classroom.
Last Modified: 08/30/2020
Modified by: Robert J Stern
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