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90-7 Engaging 6-12 grade teachers and students in genuine paleontological research through the Earth Science Reciprocal Learning Year (EaRLY) Initiative

Session: Diversifying Geoscience Education Across the Academic Playing Field: Using Creative Methods to Foster the Current and Next Generations of Geoscience Professionals, Part I

Presenting Author:

Melanie Hopkins

Authors:

Hopkins, Melanie Jane¹, Trowbridge, Cristina², Nikolic, Mark³, Johnson, Eleanor⁴, Romano, Allison⁵, Stokes, Philip J.⁶

(1) American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA, (2) American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA, (3) American Museum of Natural History, New York City, NY, USA; Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA, (4) American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA; Harlem Renaissance High School, New York, NY, USA, (5) Cornwall Central High School, New Windsor, NY, USA, (6) Hamburg Natural History Society, Blasdell, NY, USA,

Abstract:

The Earth-science Reciprocal Learning Year (EaRLY) Initiative was an NSF-funded teacher professional development program which ran from 2019-2025. The goals of the program were two pronged: to give middle and high school teachers working in high needs schools in New York State field experiences and opportunities for building fossil collections for use in the classrooms; and to bring bulk rocks into their classrooms to give their students opportunities to find and identify fossils themselves. As a part of the program, teachers shared the occurrence and abundance data their students collected with project leaders and with other participating teachers, using the results as a foundation for discussing both biological and geological processes. The bulk rocks were sampled each year from the same stratigraphic interval – the lower part of the Givetian (Devonian) Moscow Formation -- exposed at Penn Dixie Fossil Park and Reserve, in Hamburg, New York. However, the comparison of data collected across classrooms is complicated by numerous variables, including number of students, amount of bulk rock, and amount of time spent processing samples. Further, the samples were not all collected from the same part of the park. Here we interrogate the efficacy of the program to generate “good” data for these purposes. We do this is two ways. First, we compare the results tabulated by high school students with those tabulated by an “expert” across the same six samples. Second, we apply non-parameter statistics to the data collected across all classrooms to determine if differences in relative abundances of different groups are significant after controlling for variation in sampling. We then explore the biological interpretation of the outcomes and reflect on the project’s effectiveness in engaging students in genuine paleontological research.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

Engaging 6-12 grade teachers and students in genuine paleontological research through the Earth Science Reciprocal Learning Year (EaRLY) Initiative

Description

Session Format: Oral

Presentation Date: 10/20/2025

Presentation Start Time: 09:35 AM

Presentation Room: HBGCC, 301A

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