It's About Time: Teaching the Temporal Aspects of Geoscience

Determining rates of geoscience processes and dates of key events lie at the heart of geoscience research. Concepts associated with how geoscientists determine rates and dates are difficult for students to learn and challenging for instructors to teach. An understanding of geologic time is important for all students in geoscience courses.

Strategies for teaching how geoscientists date events using paleontology, radiometric dating, relative proxy data, and other techniques and on strategies for bringing cutting edge geochronologic research into the classroom are highlighted. Because of the importance of geologic time to geoscience education, this session calls for discipline-wide reflection of the role of dates, rates, and geologic time in the preparation of future geoscientists and in geoscience curriculum at all levels (K-16, informal education).

This website showcases the breadth of activities, strategies and methods for teaching about dates, rates, and time that are used in the many disciplines encompassed by geoscience education. This site was created to support a the Rates and Time session at GSA meeting in 2005.

Note: See the Special Issue of the Journal of Geoscience Education Call for Papers Rates and Dates: Teaching the Temporal Aspects of Geoscience