258-4 "The Math Your Earth Science Majors Need" Modules: Faculty Experience and Website Use

Session: Quantitative and Data Analysis Skills in Geoscience Education: Supporting Student, Course, and Program Outcomes (Posters)

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Abstract:

The Math Your Earth Science Majors Need (TMYN-Majors; serc.carleton.edu/mathyouneed/geomajors) has developed, tested, and published 14 free online co-curricular math modules to support Earth science majors’ quantitative skills. Each module applies quantitative skills to real-world Earth science problems with examples from various sub-disciplines to bridge the gap between generic math preparation and the applied quantitative problem solving needed in Earth science courses and careers. The modules include mathematical topics (e.g., exponential equations, vectors) and statistical topics (e.g., histograms, probability). 

Modules were created by two-person author teams during development workshops in 2023 and 2024 and tested during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years. Twenty-two geoscience faculty members served as authors and tested the modules in a total of 33 courses. Based on the experience of the authors and a previous project (TMYN-Intro; serc.carleton.edu/mathyouneed), along with evidence-based best practices from other studies, recommendations for successful implementation were compiled into an Instructor Guide (serc.carleton.edu/mathyouneed/geomajors/about/instructor.html). Some key components are: 

  --Feature the relevance (and awesomeness) of math in solving Earth science questions --Introduce the modules in class but then assign them as homework for self-paced learning outside class and make them required (i.e. for credit) --Require students to apply the skill multiple times in subsequent exercises or projects (“distributed practice”)

Among the authors who tested modules with their students, the statistics modules were used at a higher rate (normalized by the number of years a module was tested). Each “math skills” module was used among this group an average of 3.75 times/yr, whereas each “statistics skills” module was used an average of 5.92 times/yr. The two most-used modules were Introductory Statistics and Linear Regression. More broadly, over the first two years of website existence (August 2023-July 2025) the TMYN-Majors site had 56,600 visitors. Ternary Diagrams and Scientific Notation were by far the most viewed with ~16,600 visitors each. This suggests that people finding the website via web searches may be more frequently looking for help with different quantitative skills than those that Earth science faculty commonly assign to students.

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

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