Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Changes In Geologic Time Understanding In A Class For Preservice Teachers, Rebecca Teed, William Slattery

Earth and Environmental Sciences Faculty Publications

The paradigm of geologic time is built on complex concepts, and students master it in multiple steps. Concepts in Geology is an inquiry-based geology class for preservice teachers at Wright State University. The instructors used the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) to determine if students' understanding of key ideas about geologic time and Earth history changed between the first and last day of the course. For three of the four GCI questions analyzed in this study, the number of correct student responses increased significantly between the pretest and the post-test, indicating that many of the students were learning the concepts being …