Natural Resources, School of
Date of this Version
March 2002
Abstract
Many K-12 educators never experience active learning processes in their science courses that are part of their formal teacher preparation program because of the prevalence of the didactic teaching approach (lecture-read-answer) used in undergraduate science classrooms. From an educational perspective there are substantial benefits to experiencing the process of science through active learning strategies. A 16-week, one semester course entitled, “Earth Systems Science for Educators” has been designed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to use an active learning approach to improve student knowledge of basic Earth science concepts. To evaluate the extent to which their knowledge has improved, we developed a fairly simple assessment instrument, which consists of 38 statements in which the student responds true-false-“I do not know.” Based on pre- and post-course assessments of 108 elementary and middle-level education majors who took the class in 5 different semesters from 1998 to 2000, there was an average increase in their content knowledge of 30 percent.
Comments
Published in Journal of Geoscience Education, v.50, n.2, March, 2002, p. 169-175. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission.