Geology misconceptions targeted by an overlapping consensus of US national standards and frameworks

Abstract

In the past few decades, scientific and educational entities in the United States have repeatedly expended considerable fiscal and human resources in an effort to establish contemporary education standards, curriculum frameworks, and assessment tools. These efforts are intended to reform the quantity and quality of K-16 Earth science education across the U.S. including, most recently, the Next Generation Science Standards. Most of the reform efforts enthusiastically recommend a constructivist-oriented approach to instruction that requires educators to clearly identify their learning targets. At the same time, a contemporary approach to instruction requires educators to be aware of misconceptions, misunderstandings, naïve beliefs, and alternative frameworks students bring to the learning experience. Although several dated surveys of learners' geology misconceptions exist across the scholarly literature landscape, little of the geology misconceptions literature is systematically organised around the current collections of U.S. national standards and frameworks. Geoscience educators, curriculum developers, and assessment specialists benefit from summaries of misconceptions research organised around various national reform efforts.

Inquiring children and elementary school teachers to diagnose their conceptions about islands

“…A substantial body of knowledge unraveled several misunderstandings about geological topics in students (Dove, 1998;Blake, 2005;Sibley, 2005;Francek, 2013;Mills et al, 2017;Cardoso et al, 2018;Guffey and Slater, 2020;Bakopoulou et al, 2021), adults (Cardoso et al, 2018), teachers (Dahl et al, 2005;King, 2008;Francek, 2013;Corrochano and Gómez-Gonçalves, 2020), or even textbooks (King, 2010). These investigations focused mainly on geological issues related to the internal structure of the Earth, plate tectonics, geological time scale, rocks, and mineral formation, volcanology, and seismology.…”

“…Also, several times these preconceived ideas are not aligned with the scientifically accepted concepts, which gives rise to inaccurate or wrong conceptions. In the geosciences field, several authors recognize the existence of these (mis)conceptions regarding concepts, processes, and phenomena (Blake, 2005;Sibley, 2005;Francek, 2013;Cardoso et al, 2018;Guffey and Slater, 2020;Bakopoulou et al, 2021), whether in children or adults, as well as in teachers (Dahl et al, 2005;King, 2008;Corrochano and Gómez-Gonçalves, 2020).…”

The research trends and contributions of science education during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A narrative systematic literature review of publications in selected journals

“…The branches of earth and space science education articles published in SE , JRST and IJSE during the COVID‐19 pandemic (2020–2021) include: indigenous status positively affected for earth/space learning (Cooper & Berry, 2020); geoscience curricula (Donaldson et al., 2020; King, Gorfinkiel, et al., 2021; Corrochano & Gómez‐Gonçalves, 2020; Remmen & Frøyland, 2020; Atasoy et al., 2020); misconceptions about geology (Guffey & Slater, 2020); social‐institutional of science in the Earth, Sun and Moon unit (Akbayrak & Kaya, 2020); climate change (Young et al., 2020; Sezen‐barrie & Marbach‐ad, 2021; Carman et al., 2021; Nyarko et al., 2021; Zummo, 2020), solar system learning progressions (Plummer et al., 2020); a discussion about time within periodicity in the planetarium dome (Marques et al., 2021); and a multiple case study approach to computer simulation classroom orchestration of heat transfer, Earth, and the sun (Magana et al., 2021). This study shows that the branch of earth/space science contributed the least amount of papers compared to the other branches.…”

Establishing A Consensus Of Geology Concepts Using U.S. National Science Education Reform Documents

“…Consider the recent example from astronomy, which is a domain of Earth science (Singer, Nielsen, & Schweingruber, 2012;. Adams and Slater (2000) provided a roadmap astronomy education agenda which drove a decade's worth of development of single-topic conceptual surveys, which included the Star Properties Concept Inventory (Bailey, Johnson, Prather, & Slater, 2012) and many others (Guffey & Slater, 2020). The broader astronomy community realized that from what educators and students would benefit most was a "single, comprehensive, easy-to-use, and easy-to-score assessment instrument based on natural student language, as opposed to the vocabulary of scientific jargon" (Guffey et al, 2017, p. 26;Slater, Slater, Heyer, & Bailey, 2015).…”