Open Collections

Sultana, Nigar

University of British Columbia

Geologic time has been identified as a threshold concept in geoscience (Teed and Slattery 2011) for those who are pursuing careers in geoscience. It is such an intricate concept that has remained challenging to communicate in formal learning environments for a long time, let alone in informal learning environments. There is limited research on how people conceptualize and learn geologic time (Ryker et al. 2018). The use of validated instruments to assess student understanding of geologic time has been a common practice among researchers and practitioners. However, it remains a question whether those questions in the validated instruments are capable enough in reporting students’ knowledge. Therefore, a mixed-methods study was conducted on undergraduate students. The results showed that while most students knew the relative order and spacing of events in Earth’s history, it was difficult for them to provide absolute ages for those events or provide dates that aligned with the relative spacing of the Earth history timeline figure they chose. Students were especially confused about the absolute ages of more recent events– the disappearance of dinosaurs and the appearance of humans. Now in informal learning environments, it was more important to check whether visitors engage with a digital geologic time exhibit, and if they do, then whether there is any evidence of cognitive and affective engagement in their behaviors. A mixed-methods study was conducted to get an account of visitor engagement patterns with a digital geologic time exhibit in Beaty Biodiversity Museum. The results reveal that people did interact with the exhibit, but duration of interaction was mostly less than one minute. Visitors in groups tended to interact with exhibit more than individual visitors, and those groups typically consisted of adults and kids who seemed like family/friend groups. There was also evidence of cognitive (e.g., curiosity) and affective (e.g., enjoyment) engagement among those who interacted suggesting that digital exhibits can initiate situational interest among visitors in informal learning environments. Insights from both studies lay the groundwork for developing new tools (e.g., pre/post-test instrument and interview protocol) to assess people’s learning about geologic time for formal and informal learning environments.

Text

2024-04-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88002

Geological Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/