This paper organizes and analyses over 500 geoscience misconceptions relating to earthquakes, earth structure, geologic resources, glaciers, historical geology, karst (limestone terrains), plate tectonics, rivers, rocks and minerals, soils, volcanoes, and weathering and erosion. Journal and reliable web resources were reviewed to discover (1) the…

Effective instructional explanations help the students to construct coherent mental representations. To do so, one condition is that they must be tailored to students' needs. It is hypothesized that explanations are more helpful if they also explicitly aid the students to detect problems in their mental representations, as this provokes an impasse…

The Plate Tectonics Project is a multiday, inquiry-based unit that facilitates students as self-motivated learners. Reliable Web sites are offered to assist with lessons, and a summative rubric is used to facilitate the holistic nature of the project. After each topic (parts of the Earth, continental drift, etc.) is covered, the students will…

Surveys of the earth science content of all secondary (high school) science textbooks and related publications used in England and Wales have revealed high levels of error/misconception. The 29 science textbooks or textbook series surveyed (51 texts in all) showed poor coverage of National Curriculum earth science and contained a mean level of one…

For an inquiry-based alternative to lectures and recall tests, I encouraged learners to become "geotourists"; that is, learners researched and developed a geologic guidebook to a United States National Park of their choice. Over the course of a semester, students wrote chapters on plate tectonics, the rock cycle, geologic history,…

This article examines the role of gesture in the shared meaning-making processes of 6th-grade students studying plate tectonics using a data visualization tool; specifically, a geographic information system. Students' verbal and gestural characterizations of key concepts of plate motions (i.e., "subduction", "rift", and "buckling") were…

Learning science includes learning to argue with "inscriptions": images used to symbolize information persuasively. This study examined sixth-graders learning to invest inscriptions with representational status, in a geographic information system (GIS)-based science investigation. Learning to reason with inscriptions was studied in emergent…