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…

One of the most powerful pieces of knowledge that students can gain from the study of geology is an understanding of the immense scale of geologic time. In the author's introductory-level physical geology course at Northern Virginia Community College, they discuss geologic time about one-third of the way through the semester, after a thorough…