In the past couple of decades, the geoscience education community has made great strides toward investigating how to provide effective student learning experiences in the college setting. While experiences such as student-centered teaching strategies and course design elements are useful for the instructor, they may not make important elements of…

A future instructor's teaching beliefs contribute to whether they will use research-validated teaching strategies. We surveyed and interviewed potential future geoscience faculty as represented by graduate students and post-doctoral scholars to characterize their teaching beliefs, evaluate changes in those beliefs over time, and identify…

Efforts to promote the use of student-centered learning environments in STEM education have been tempered by a lack of professional development strategies that help faculty overcome common barriers to reform. This study investigated the impact that adopting a suite of student-centered teaching materials had on the teaching practices and beliefs of…

Many agencies, organizations, and researchers have called for the incorporation of inquiry-based learning in college classrooms. Providing inquiry-based activities in laboratory courses is one way to promote reformed, student-centered teaching in introductory geoscience courses. However, the literature on inquiry has relatively few geoscience…

Background: Barriers to reforming traditional lecture-based undergraduate STEM classes are numerous and include time constraints, lack of training, and instructor's beliefs about teaching and learning. This case study documents the use of a situated instructional coaching process as a method of faculty professional development. In this model, a…

The introductory physical geology laboratory courses taught at North Carolina State University aims to promote scientific thinking and learning through the use of scientific inquiry-based activities. A rubric describing five possible levels of inquiry was applied to characterize the laboratory activities in the course. Two rock and mineral…