Collaborative Research: GP-IN: Transforming geoscience fieldwork into integrated, virtual education experiences

Successful solutions to complex global challenges transcend disciplinary boundaries and necessitate integrating diverse fields of knowledge, making interdisciplinary education an urgent need to train our national workforce. Few sciences rely on integration more than geosciences, which play critical, foundational roles in nearly every sector of the U.S. economy, from energy exploration and environmental conservation to disaster preparedness.

Experiences such as field trips, summer programs, and hands-on outdoor activities have been repeatedly shown to increase retention, maximize learning gains, and improve students’ attitudes, perceptions, and feelings toward STEM topics. Unfortunately, field trips can be costly, and physical disabilities and logistical and administrative constraints can restrict access to field-based learning opportunities for many students, potentially hindering their interest in geoscience.

This project addresses this important impediment to inclusivity by developing the first immersive, online Virtual Field Trip (VFT) that capitalizes on the exciting imagery and experience of paleontologic fieldwork. The novel VFT will help address issues in exposure to geoscience content by providing high school and early-college teachers with freely available, geoscience-inclusive resources which can be easily incorporated into their existing classes.

This project will capitalize on the broad appeal of both dinosaur paleontology and virtual field trips (VFT) by combining them into an innovative new resource for educators. The VFT will cover core principles of geography, math, biology, and physics within the context of a virtual paleontology expedition, which will function as an open-ended, self-paced, ‘capstone’ educational program embedded with a plethora of educational ‘training’ materials and media from real fieldwork.

The primary goals of this project are to: (1) increase exposure to geosciences in high schools and early-college classrooms by incorporating lessons utilizing geoscience examples and problems into existing courses; (2) enhance educational content for traditional courses such as geography, math, physics, and biology by integrating these disciplines, and; (3) identify factors contributing to effective recruitment and retention in the geoscience pipeline so that they may be employed by educators to successfully broaden participation in these exciting and impactful fields.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.