ongoing educational anomaly of Earth Science Placement, The

Journal of Geoscience Education, Sep 2003 by Messina, Paula, Speranza, Paul, Metzger, Ellen P, Stoffer, Phil

To understand geologic phenomena, one must have the ability to envision three-dimensional processes, and must be able to imagine their progressions over vast amounts of time. This "fourth-dimensional" intellectual capacity is a fairly sophisticated hallmark of a formal operational stage of cognitive development. This level of abstract thought may first evolve in adolescents, but some individuals never achieve this level, even well into adulthood (Piaget and Inhelder, 1958). Could the subject matter itself simply be too difficult for most adolescents, and many adults?

Why then do school districts around the country offer Earth Science to students whose cognitive development is characterized a s being atmore of a "concrete operational" stage? The curriculum needs to be adapted to the linear-reasoning capacities of its audience, and often the topics are necessarily limited to descriptions, identification, or memorization of material. When Earth Science is taught in this concrete-operational manner, it is indeed true to its reputation as Rocks for Jocks," and the status of Earth Science remains misleadingly low. Hence, when adults enroll in a course on the undergraduate level, their expectations may be unrealistic, and their success is somewhat dependent on whether they have achieved the cognitive skills to grasp abstract thought.

THE UPSIDE-DOWN PYRAMID

Today's high school science sequence was developed over a century ago, when science was far more descriptive and concrete. Since the 1800s, it has been common practice for freshmen to take General Science or Biology, sophomores Chemistry, and juniors Physics. Geology hardly existed as a separate discipline at the time that this structure was first instituted, and now -even despite the plate tectonic revolution-it still remains as an elective at best, or more frequently, as an alternative to the traditional science menu for students of lower academic achievement. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (2000), in 1998 (the most recent year for which data are available), only 20.7 percent of high school graduates took Geology or Earth Science, compared to 92.7 percent who took Biology and 60.4 percent who took Chemistry. These figures are consistent with those of a survey conducted four years earlier (Smith, 2000), when 24.4 percent of high school students took a geology or Earth science course. If there is any significant trend indicated at all, Earth science courses are becoming less available on the high school level over time.

At the high school level, juniors and seniors who are deemed at a lower academic level were able to excel at the more conceptual topics (such as interpreting contour maps). The "brighter" freshmen had problems with the visualization associated with this exercise. This antiquated progression has been the subject of a relatively recent movement to put Physics first. While only a few schools actually have retrained their teachers and made the difficult transition to ninth-grade Physics, there is increasing consensus that flipping the sequence gives the curriculum a coherence it now lacks, and allows students to build on concepts they have learned (Lewin, 1999). By inverting the traditional succession, students would be given the tools to grasp complex concepts, and by delaying the fourth-dimensional concepts to the junior or senior year, they would more likely have already developed the cognitive skills characteristic of a more mature brain by then.