Studying Earthquakes and other natural disasters can be a very “cool” lesson. In fact "Earth's Crust" was the first full episode ever aired by the famous children's science series Bill Nye the Science Guy.
The average student in the United States has not experienced a culturally significant geologic process (earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami) especially if they live in the central and eastern parts of the country.
However, we can create maps like the one below because of access to research and technology. Learning about earthquakes in the United States also includes teaching safety techniques, how to access maps and websites, and tells us where they are most likely to occur. They are exposed to graphs and tables that show earthquakes as numbers and magnitudes.
Earth Science is a notoriously difficult subject to connect with personally. Teaching students the political, social, and economic concepts behind the sharing of scientific knowledge allows them to see earthquakes as more than a model of two tectonic plates converging or magnitudes on a graph.
It is important to teach these seismic events as physical natural disasters which can change the lives of thousands of real people within minutes.
The average student in the United States has not experienced a culturally significant geologic process (earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami) especially if they live in the central and eastern parts of the country.
However, we can create maps like the one below because of access to research and technology. Learning about earthquakes in the United States also includes teaching safety techniques, how to access maps and websites, and tells us where they are most likely to occur. They are exposed to graphs and tables that show earthquakes as numbers and magnitudes.
Earth Science is a notoriously difficult subject to connect with personally. Teaching students the political, social, and economic concepts behind the sharing of scientific knowledge allows them to see earthquakes as more than a model of two tectonic plates converging or magnitudes on a graph.
“The ability to reason well about complex models of data is essential
not only for scientists but for non-scientists as well. All citizens need to be
able to reason well about complex evidence such as evidence relating to health
and medical decisions, evidence relating to social policies upon which citizens
vote, or evidence relating to the best way to promote employee motivation and
satisfaction. Learning an oversimplified version of scientific reasoning will
not help on such real-world reasoning tasks” (Chinn and Malhotra, 2002).
It is important to teach these seismic events as physical natural disasters which can change the lives of thousands of real people within minutes.
Comments
Post a Comment