English

Teaching Mineralogy

This book is an outgrowth of a workshop on teaching mineralogy held at Smith College in June 1996 and sponsored by a grant from the Division of Undergraduate Education, National Science Foundation (DUE-9554635). Seventy participants, from diverse institutional settings and from all academic ranks, met to explore common interests in improving instruction in mineralogy. At the workshop, participants took part as both instructors and as students. They had the opportunity to explore a variety of new instructional methods and materials and also to observe their colleagues as instructors. All were encouraged to test these activities in their own classrooms, to evaluate their effectiveness, to suggest changes to the authors, and to develop new and complementary exercises. The sourcebook before you is the product of this group effort. Teaching mineralogy is both challenging and rewarding. Mineralogy is typically taught as the first pre-professional course in an undergraduate geology curriculum. The large amount of information and abstract nature of much of the content presents formidable barriers to learning for many students. In recent years, educational scholars have discovered a great d

Sign in with your free account to read, download EPUBs or listen.