Join education staff from Tellus Science Museum to see fossils that call Georgia home and discuss how to incorporate place-based geoscience education with elementary science standards.

TAKEAWAYS:
Attendees will see how a science museum has worked to improve its own geoscience education using a place-based approach and how similar processes can be applied to education practice in classrooms or other localities.

SPEAKERS:
Hannah Eisla (Tellus Science Museum: Cartersville, GA)

Students in K-12 science classrooms don’t think about diagrams the same way adults do, and can be easily “overloaded.” Research in cognition gives us tools to make science diagrams that more effectively support learning. Surprise: often, students learn more without features like arrows and colors!

TAKEAWAYS:
Effective diagrams direct student attention to the most important information and relationships while minimizing cognitive load. Strategies for doing so include tree structures, explicit cues for implicit information, replacing realistic photos with illustrations, and use of the proximity principle.

SPEAKERS:
Audrey Rabi Whitaker (Academy for Young Writers: Brooklyn, NY)