Presenting settled science does not provide the royal road to learning: A critical look at undergraduate geoscience topic sequencing

Humanity faces growing concerns from the natural world, including clean air and water supplies, mineral and energy resource extraction and consumption, natural hazards and increased climate change-related risks. To mitigate such concerns, we need a population that is geoscience literate. Engagement and learning within the geosciences are highly dependent on the nature of teaching and how responsive instruction is to how students learn. Recent research documenting the order of topics taught in undergraduate introductory geoscience courses as well as a survey of commercially available introductory geoscience textbooks shows that the first topics students experience in introductory courses deal with the origin of the universe, the solar system, and earth, as well as the theory of plate tectonics (macrocosm), before then addressing chemistry—atoms, bonding, and molecules (microcosm). These concepts are well outside the students’ experiential frameworks in both scales of time and space. What we know from how people learn, philosophically, theoretically, and empirically is that students require concrete experiences as building blocks for abstract ideas. Learning must begin within the scale of the students’ everyday concrete experiences before moving to the abstract. This paper elaborates on this argument and then puts forth implications for instruction to be effective. These include understanding the origin of common misconceptions, breaking down large explanatory concepts (like theories) into hierarchies of supporting elements that are more concrete, and providing students with concrete experiences they can leverage effectively to develop more reliable (i.e., scientific consensus) concepts.