Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Dec 2004
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agufmed13a0719s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #ED13A-0719
Mathematics
Logic
8125 Evolution Of The Earth, 0810 Post-Secondary Education, 0825 Teaching Methods, 0850 Geoscience Education Research
Scientific paper
Students often have difficulties in appreciating just how old the earth and the universe are. While they can simply memorize a number, they really do not understand just how big that number really is, in comparison with other, more familiar student referents like the length of a human lifetime or how long it takes to eat a pizza. (See, e.g., R.D. Trend 2001, J. Research in Science Teaching 38(2): 191-221) Students, and members of the general public, also display such well-known misconceptions as the "Flintstone chronology" of believing that human beings and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. (In the classic American cartoon "The Flintstones," human beings used dinosaurs as draft animals. As scientists we know this is fiction, but not all members of the public understand that.) In an interdisciplinary undergraduate college class that dealt with astronomy, cosmology, and biological evolution, I used a familiar activity to try to improve student understanding of the concept of time's vastness. Students walked through a pre-determined 600-step path which provided a spatial analogy to the geological time scale. They stopped at various points and engaged in some pre-determined discussions and debates. This activity is as old as the hills, but reports of its effectiveness or lack thereof are quite scarce. This paper demonstrates that this activity was effective for a general-audience, college student population in the U.S. The growth of student understandings of the geological time scale was significant as a result of this activity. Students did develop an understanding of time's vastness and were able to articulate this understanding in various ways. This growth was monitored through keeping track of several exam questions and through pre- and post- analysis of student writings. In the pre-writings, students often stated that they had "no idea" about how to illustrate the size of the geological time scale to someone else. While some post-time walk responses simply restated what was done in the walk through time, some students were able to develop their own ways of conceptualizing the vastness of the geological time scale. A variety of findings from student understandings will be presented. This work has been supported in part by the Distinguished Scholars Program of the National Science Foundation (DUE-0308557).
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