Teamwork has been identified as an essential employability skill and learning outcome in the geosciences, especially during fieldwork. Although specific teamwork skills have been identified in prior research, few studies to date have addressed how students develop or use these skills during their educational preparation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, including the geosciences. In this paper, we use a descriptive, qualitative embedded, single-case study to explore how geoscience students develop teamwork skills during a hydrogeology field course in the absence of any explicit instruction about teamwork, using a theoretical lens of input-process-output taxonomy of teamwork skills. We collected data using the Geoscience Teamwork Observation (GTO) protocol and verified findings against focus group discussions held after each week of team observations. We identified that students do use a wide range of teamwork skills in the absence of instruction on teamwork, and these skills changed across different teams and under different contexts during fieldwork. Student teams most frequently used skills of communication, leadership, peer-mentoring and teaching, and coordination. Skills related to goal identification, information synthesis and organizational management were utilized least often. We recommend instructional strategies that explicitly treat teamwork skills as learning outcomes, prior teaching of teamwork as part of fieldwork, and using observations as a strategy for teaching and assessing teamwork during fieldwork. We also provide a shared approach for evaluating teamwork skills to enhance workforce preparation and draw attention to key issues relating to creating effective teamwork outcomes during fieldwork.

Training a scientific workforce in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change drives an international need for climate science education, including in Ghana. How preservice teachers understand climate change, and the often misunderstood relationship between ozone depletion and global warming, critically impacts the students they will teach. This mixed method, descriptive study explores preservice teachers’ climate change and ozone depletion knowledge, and documents the sources of their ideas. Elementary preservice science teachers from three colleges of education in Ghana completed a survey (N = 255) and interview (n = 30). Exploratory factor analysis yielded six factors related to ozone depletion and four related to climate change knowledge. Survey and interview responses revealed that the preservice teachers could explain that stratospheric ozone is a layer of gas in the atmosphere that prevents ultraviolet radiation from reaching Earth. Yet, they could not describe how ozone forms and the mechanism of ozone destruction. The preservice teachers confused climate change with changes in weather and seasons, but could explain how anthropogenic activities like deforestation and burning fossil fuels contribute to climate change. About 88% of the participants thought climate change and ozone depletion were causally linked – either ozone depletion caused climate change, or climate change caused ozone depletion. The participating preservice teachers identified textbooks (80%), instructors (64%), and the media (62%) as the main sources of their ozone depletion and climate change knowledge. We identified a mix of knowledge gaps and coherent ideas that offer scaffolds on which to improve teachers’ knowledge of climate change and ozone depletion.

Background: The objective of this systematic review is to identify characteristics, trends, and gaps in measurement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education research. Methods: We searched across several peer-reviewed sources, including a book, similar systematic reviews, conference proceedings, one online repository, and four databases that index the major STEM education research journals. We included empirical studies that reported on psychometric development of scales developed on college/university students for the context of post-secondary STEM education in the US. We excluded studies examining scales that ask about specific content knowledge and contain less than three items. Results were synthesized using descriptive statistics. Results: Our final sample included the total number of N = 82 scales across N = 72 studies. Participants in the sampled studies were majority female and White, most scales were developed in an unspecified STEM/science and engineering context, and the most frequently measured construct was attitudes. Internal structure validity emerged as the most prominent validity evidence, with exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) being the most common. Reliability evidence was dominated by internal consistency evidence in the form of Cronbach’s alpha, with other forms being scarcely reported, if at all. Discussion: Limitations include only focusing on scales developed in the United States and in post-secondary contexts, limiting the scope of the systematic review. Our findings demonstrate that when developing scales for STEM education research, many types of psychometric properties, such as differential item functioning, test–retest reliability, and discriminant validity are scarcely reported. Furthermore, many scales only report internal structure validity (EFA and/or CFA) and Cronbach’s alpha, which are not enough evidence alone. We encourage researchers to look towards the full spectrum of psychometric evidence both when choosing scales to use and when developing their own. While constructs such as attitudes and disciplines such as engineering were dominant in our sample, future work can fill in the gaps by developing scales for disciplines, such as geosciences, and examine constructs, such as engagement, self-efficacy, and perceived fit.

Geoscience employers have increasingly called for the future workforce (students) to demonstrate competence in non-technical skills, including teamwork. This descriptive qualitative study contributes to ongoing efforts to identify the specific practices, skills, habits, and knowledge that make up these desired teamwork competencies in the geosciences. We collected interview data from three online focus group discussions centered around teamwork. Focus group participants (n = 12) were hydrogeology and environmental geology employers and team managers from government, private industry, and nonprofit organizations in the United States. Using a teamwork skills taxonomy model as our conceptual framework, we coded the transcripts to generate three categories of teamwork skills specific to environmental geoscience teams. First, our data indicate that these employers value team transition skills related to specifying goals, interpreting team tasks, identifying resources, and planning. The second category of desired teamwork competencies included action skills such as metacognition, coordination, and mentoring. These skills directly impact successful task completion. The third category captured interpersonal skills such as emotional intelligence, proactive communication, and organization. A fourth category of desired teamwork competencies emerged from data analysis and include ethical skills related to trust, integrity, and humility. This study provides a detailed description of teamwork competencies desired by environmental geoscience employers. We recommend that geoscience instructors consider using techniques such as intentional teaching of teamwork skills, experiential learning, professional development, and teamwork awareness in order to prepare students for workforce expectations.

Current science education efforts emphasise the need to train students to understand the nature of scientific work. In geosciences, training students to understand how science works does not only promote their interest and community engagement in the field, but also has the potential to promote awareness and ethics. However, instructional activities using an explicit and reflective approach to promote students’ learning of the nature of science concepts remain scant. In this paper, a two-class unit intervention using an explicit reflective approach to the teaching of nature of science was used in an undergraduate lesson on the history of plate tectonics. We measured the influence of the lesson on students’ nature of science knowledge using the Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry instrument. We collected parallel quantitative and qualitative pre- and post-intervention data from 37 community college students involved in a physical geology course. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis indicated that students’ nature of science knowledge related to the tentativeness of scientific theories and the role of society and culture in science improved after the intervention unit. Results imply that geoscience educators should consider using explicit and reflective approaches when using the history of science to teach about the nature of science.

As much as we think of a geologic map as objective, it is filtered through the experiences of individual geologists and the larger geology community. Thus it is important to understand how geologists become proficient at geologic mapping. As part of a naturalistic study of mapping strategies, 67 geologists ranging from undergraduates to professionals described experiences that promoted personal competence. These interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, coded and interpreted. Using Lave and Wenger’s ( 1991 Lave, J. , & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] ) theory of situated learning, we generated three categories that captured how learning to map is “situated” relative to the instructional, physical, and cultural environments. First, content described how learners acquire skill and knowledge through engaging in practices of experts. Participants reported successfully learning to map through structured progressions that taught content and skill while providing mentored practice. Second, participation captured how learners interact with experiences. Participants described long-term, purposeful immersion in the field during which they learned from experiences that encouraged self-reflection and productive struggle. Finally, community of practice described meaningful relations that allowed learners to become full members of the professional community. Participants reported how working in peer groups, learning from mentors, and teaching others helped them to learn to map. We present a model of how these themes interact in the context of learning to map, and suggest how mapping instruction might leverage influential experiences. Results suggest that the community of practice was a crucial contributor and that learning was defined as much by the professional community as by the physical environment.