Publications

There is a wide gap between the importance of Earth science (or geoscience) for humankind's quality and ability of life and the current, low profile of the educational potential of Earth science in school systems. The marginalized status of Earth Science Education (ESE) is evident in the multitude of environmental challenges confronting humanity. Global warming is more an educational crisis than a climate crisis. Over the last 30 years, research in Earth science education has laid a robust theoretical foundation and developed practical strategies and techniques for effective teaching of Earth science in K-12 education. However, the quality of this research, and the growing need for knowledge in Earth science, have yet to do much to improve the profile of ESE in schools worldwide. Only genuine paradigm shifts in educational perceptions and attitudes of the geoscience community will enable the narrowing of the disturbing gap presented above. The following are the required paradigm shifts: (1) Changing the attitudes of geoscientists toward their role in society and the adoption of geoethically values; (2) understanding that ESE is one of the top geoethics values and the geoscience community has to build a scientific pressure group for introducing the earth sciences as an integral part of schools' science curricula from K-12; (3) moving from the reductionist paradigm toward the holistic Earth systems approach; (4) understanding that teaching is about something other than information transmission, in fact teaching is a profession that involves the ability to stimulate the embedded human learning instinct; (5) moving from environmental awareness to environmental insight; (6) moving from the essentialism-based teaching culture toward the learning instinct paradigm.

The global society of today struggles with grand challenges, such as climate change, the degradation of ecosystems, and the loss of bio-and geodiversity, as identified in several documents. The search for solutions to these and other problems on the way to sustainable development necessarily involves a better understanding of the Earth system and its dynamics. The Earth system is composed of five highly dependent and interrelated subsystems that exchange matter and energy. This notion is at the base of what in the literature is named Earth System Science (ESS). Humanity has been profoundly altering the dynamics of this system, leading to the proposal of a new geological epochthe Anthropocene. Developing a holistic understanding of the complex and tangled relationships between subsystems and the role of human impacts is the target of study of Earth System Education (ESE). With the assumptions of ESS, ESE is emerging as a new approach in science education. Based on a deep knowledge of the planet and the development of specific competencies, such as system thinking, it is possible to perform more actively and consciously in the relationships that citizens develop with the Earth system, enabling the existence of a more viable future for humanity.

The International Geoscience Education Organisation organised three Teacher Training Workshops in Goa, Mangaluuru and Bengaluuru during July 2-5, July 7-10 and July 12-15, 2015 jointly with the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research, St. Aloysius College (Autonomous) and the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology, which were attended by 17, 48 and 63 high school teachers respectively. These were organised as a pilot project to test the impact of such an approach in an Indian setting.

Looking closely on its influence of environmental education on the development of environmental literacy indicates that for many cases it never reaches far beyond the level of recycling and cleaning of the schoolyard. One of the reasons for these limited outcomes is focusing mainly on the development of environmental awareness and almost ignoring the development of environmental insight. This environmental insight involves the implementation of the Earth systems approach which is a holistic framework for Earth sciences and science curricula that emphasizes the study of the cyclic pattern of the transformation of matter and energy among the four Earth systems: geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. An important part of the educational effectiveness of the Earth systems approach depends on the system thinking abilities of its learners. This chapter presents findings from two independent studies of school students and adult. These studies that used a mixed approach methodology enable to draw a clear linkage between learning through the Earth systems approach and the development of system thinking abilities and a clear linkage between system thinking abilities, which is the heart of environmental insight, and positive environmental behavior.

In this two-part study, we examine undergraduate university students' expression of two important system thinking characteristics-dynamic thinking and cyclic thinking-focusing particularly on students of geology. The study was conducted using an Earth systems questionnaire designed to elicit and reflect either dynamic or cyclic thinking. The study's first part was quantitative. Its population consisted of a research group (223 students majoring in geology or physical geography) and a control group (312 students with no background in geology). The students were asked to rate their agreement with each statement on a Likert scale. Overall, the students in the research group expressed higher levels of dynamic thinking than those in the control group. The geology students showed relatively strong dynamic thinking toward the geosphere and hydrosphere, but not the biosphere. In cyclic thinking, their levels were significantly higher for all Earth systems, suggesting a connection between learning about different cycles in Earth systems, developing cyclic thinking and applying it to other Earth cycles. The second part was qualitative and administered only to the students who majored in geology. They were asked to freely explain their answers to the questionnaire's statements. Our aim was to identify recurring patterns in how these students express their dynamic and cyclic thinking. Their explanations were given to four experts in the field of Earth science, who then presented, in a semi-structured interview, the recurring characteristics of dynamic thinking that they found in the students' explanations.

This study is an attempt to gain new insight, on behalf of science teachers, into the integration of metacognition (MC) into science education. Participants were 44 elementary school science teachers attending an in-service teacher-training (INST) program. Data collection was carried out by several data sources: recordings of all verbal discussions that took place during the program, teachers' written reflections, and semi-structured individual interviews. Our study provides a qualitative analysis of the 44 teachers' voices as a group, as well as a detailed case-study narrative analysis of three teachers' stories The findings show that the teachers' intuitive (pre-instructional) thinking was incomplete and unsatisfactory and their voices were skeptical and against the integration of MC. After teachers had mastered the notion of MC in the INST program, the following outcomes have been identified: (a) teachers expressed amazement at how such an important and relevant issue had been almost invisible to them; (b) teachers identified the affective character of metacognitive experiences as the most significant facet of MC, which acts as a mediator between teaching and learning; (c) the complete lack of learning materials addressing MC and the absence of supportive in-classroom guidance were identified as the major obstacles for its implementation; (d) teachers expressed a willingness to continue their professional development toward expanding their abilities to integrate MC as an inseparable component of the science curriculum. The implications of the findings for professional development courses in the field of MC are discussed.

This study examines the process by which system thinking perceptions develop within the context of a water cycle curriculum. Four junior high school students undergoing an especially designed inquiry-based intervention were closely observed before, during, immediately after, and 6 years after completing a year long systems-based learning program. The employed research tools included observations, semi-structured interviews, and a number of "concept viewing" tools (drawings, concept maps, and repertory grids). Out of the data, four distinct "stories," each presenting a different way of constructing hydro system mental models, are described. The paper's main conclusion is that students develop their systems mental models and remember the learned material based on learning patterns that tend to remain unchanged over time. Consequently, in order to facilitate efficient and lasting construction of students' system models, learning experiences should harness these, and especially the meta-cognitive learning pattern, which holds special significance for constructing systems.

This article presents a model for the development of an environmentally oriented unit designed to be implemented as an integral part of the science core curriculum. The program's main goal is encouraging students at the junior high-school level to develop systems-thinking and environmental insight as a basis for environmental literacy. A design-based research was employed in order to construct the learning program and improve it in consecutive cycles. The findings indicate that junior high school students who were involved in the learning process - through knowledge integration activities, scientific inquiry, and outdoor learning - achieved a meaningful improvement of their cyclic and systemic understanding of the water cycle. The article concludes with a summary of the program's design elements we recommend using in other programs seeking to foster students' understanding of natural cycles within the context of their influence on people's daily lives, rather than in the isolation of their specific scientific domains. It is suggested that an environmentally based science curriculum should involve authentic, real environmental topics, and at the same time, it should emphasize the role of scientific knowledge and skills that are needed for the development of environmental literacy.

This article suggests that a genuine reform endeavor towards the "Science for All" paradigm should adopt a holistic approach. There are several countries around the world that adopted the "Science for All" paradigm at the beginning of the 21st century. However, while looking closely at the amount of change that took place in schools following the new paradigm, it seems that like previous reforms, there is a gap between the rhetoric and the actual change. A series of studies indicate that Earth systems science approach is much effective than the traditional "science for all" approach. While implementing it correctly, it succeeds to attract students from both groups - the high achievers group and the much bigger group of students to whom the traditional science programs were frequently inaccessible. Both groups found the Earth System approach attractive and interesting and both gained a significant amount of knowledge and understanding. However, the earth systems approach alone will not be enough and in order to attract most of the students and in addition such programs should be based on a holistic approach that should also include the following characteristics: (1) Learning in an authentic and relevant context as much as possible. (2) Organizing the learning in a sequence that shifts gradually from the concrete to the abstract. (3) Adjusting the learning for variant abilities learners. (4) Integrating the outdoor environment as an integral and central component of the learning process. (5) Focusing on both the cognitive and the emotional aspects of learning.

The current study deals with the development of system thinking skills at the junior high school level. The sample population included about 50 eighth-grade students from two different classes of an urban Israeli junior high school who studied an earth systems-based curriculum that focused on the hydro cycle. The study addressed the following research questions: (a) Could the students deal with complex systems?; (b) What has influenced the students' ability to deal with system perception?; and (c) What are the relationship among the cognitive components of system thinking? The research combined qualitative and quantitative methods and involved various research tools, which were implemented in order to collect the data concerning the students' knowledge and understanding before, during, and following the learning process. The findings indicated that the development of system thinking in the context of the earth systems consists of several sequential stages arranged in a hierarchical structure. The cognitive skills that are developed in each stage serve as the basis for the development of the next higher-order thinking skills. The research showed that in spite of the minimal initial system thinking abilities of the students most of them made some meaningful progress in their system thinking skills, and a third of them reached the highest level of system thinking in the context of the hydro cycle. Two main factors were found to be the source of the differential progress of the students: (a) the students' individual cognitive abilities, and (b) their level of involvement in the knowledge integration activities during their inquiry-based learning both indoors and outdoors.

There have been few discoveries in geology more important than "deep time"-the understanding that the universe has existed for countless millennia, such that man's existence is confined to the last milliseconds of the metaphorical geological clock. The influence of deep time is felt in a variety of sciences including geology, cosmology, and evolutionary biology. Thus, any student that wants to master these subjects must have a good understanding of geological time. Despite its critical importance, there has been very little attention given to geological time by science education researchers. Of the work that has been done, much of it ignores the cognitive basis for students' understanding of geological time. This work addresses this gap by presenting a validation study for a new instrument-the GeoTAT (Geological Time Aptitude Test). Consisting of a series of open puzzles, the GeoTAT tested the subjects' ability to reconstruct and represent the transformation in time of a series of geological structures. Montagnero (1992, 1996) terms this ability "diachronic thinking." This instrument was distributed to a population of 285 junior and senior high school students with no background in geology, as well as 58 high school students majoring in geology. A comparison of the high school (grades 11-12) geology and non-geology majors indicated that the former group held a significant advantage over the latter in solving problems involving diachronic thinking. This relationship was especially strengthened by the second year of geological study (grade 12), with the key factor in this improvement being exposure to fieldwork. Fieldwork both improved the subjects' ability in understanding the 3-D factors influencing temporal organization, as well as providing them with experience in learning about the types of evidence that are critical in reconstructing a transformational sequence.

The SOLEI (Science Outdoor Learning Environment Inventory) was developed and content-validated in high schools in Israel. The instrument consists of seven scales (55 items). Five of the scales are based on the Science Laboratory Learning Environment Instrument (SLEI) developed in Australia. The other two scales are unique to the learning environment existing in outdoor activities. The instrument was found to be a sensitive measure that differentiates between different types of field trips conducted in the context of different subjects (biology, chemistry, and earth science). It is suggested that the instrument could be an important addition to the research tools available for studies conducted in informal settings in science education.

The specific spatial abilities required for the study of basic structural geology were characterized by quantitative and qualitative data analysis. A geologic spatial ability test (GeoSAT) was developed and administered to 115 comprehensive high-school students. Six of these students were interviewed. An analysis of students' incorrect answers revealed two types of answers: (a) nonpenetrative answers, which were based on external exposures of the structure; and (b) penetrative answers, which indicated attempts at representing internal properties of the structure. Students who tended to give penetrative incorrect answers performed significantly higher than students who tended to give nonpenetrative incorrect answers. The reasoning of students for these types of answers, as determined by interviews, supported the initial assumption that these answers were given by students with different levels of ability mentally to penetrate the image of a structure, which was named visual penetration ability (VPA). The interview findings indicated that the VPA is one of two complementary factors needed to solve the problems of GeoSAT; the other factor is the ability to perceive the spatial configuration of the structure. It is concluded that the teaching and learning process should provide students with assistance in both of these areas.