Seminar: Advances in Atmospheric Science Education Research (ASER): A Look at the Role of Cognition in Learning Meteorology

Abstract

Atmospheric Science Education Research (ASER) is a burgeoning research area that seeks to improve teaching and learning in undergraduate atmospheric science. A collaborative community of researchers is working to highlight and disseminate evidence-based education research, identify goals and challenges for ASER, provide professional development to atmospheric scientists interested in education research, design high quality ASER studies that address relevant questions, and advance recognition of ASER as an impactful research area with substantial potential to influence teaching and learning. In addition to recounting current progress and research in ASER, in this presentation I will share my own work in the field, specifically two studies that examine the cognitive aspects of learning in the discipline. In the first study, I used a novice-expert, cross-sectional design with 67 meteorologists and students to identify specific spatial thinking skills necessary to practicing and learning meteorology. This work yielded the identification of disembedding—the ability to see a pattern in a noisy background—as a statistically significant predictor of performance on the type of meteorology tasks that we typically provide to students in undergraduate meteorology classrooms. In the second study, I interviewed over 40 students as they observed demonstrations in density and rotating tanks to characterize their conceptions of fluid motion and analyze their sense-making. This study is on-going, but initial results highlight the extremely unintuitive nature of fluid dynamics and reveal that students may not be taking from these demonstrations what we as instructors hope. Both studies provide insight into aspects of student learning in meteorology and can inform pedagogies and practices for improving atmospheric science education.