The purpose of the assignment is twofold: first, to expose students to what is sometimes called a "feminist" or "care" perspective in ethics. The second is for students to apply these abstract ideas in ethics to the very real and complex issues relating to climate change in environmental ethics.

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Dinosaur fossils capture the interest of students and the public, but their study, collection, and disposition often engender signficant highly-publicized controversy. As such, ethical dilemmas emerge around fossil discoveries in the realms of scientific research, including professional and personal conduct, educational and economic roles of museums, landowner rights, fossils as commodities in a capitalist economy, and science journalism. This project uses the controversy over a highly-publicized pair of dinosaur skeletons collected from private land to examine the myriad complexly intertwined ethical issues that arise from the attempt to sell these fossils at public auction for private financial benefit. Students planning careers in paleontology and geology need to be aware of these types of controversies and the ethical choices they will face.

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This collection of case studies deals with ethics involved in publishing research in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Often, graduate students learn about these ethics informally as they go along and are often unaware that individual journals often have their own formal policies. This activity is intended to present students with some scenarios of "what would you do?", as well as guide them to find and read ethics policies of at least 2 scientific journals.

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This project involves students in substantial community-based ethnographic research. Working cooperatively together as a consultancy team, the students learn to use ethnographic and other research methods. They also learn to empower and give voice to various stakeholders and to assemble and synthesize data for a formal report.

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This activity leads to understanding common landslide hazards in the area and how they relate to weather patterns and/or local geology.

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An in-class jigsaw activity, in which students play the role of investigators consulting on behalf of an industrial client seeking an appropriate location to site a new facility to handle environmentally-damaging materials, allows students to interactively tie together key aspects of decision-making (e.g. hazardous Earth processes, prevention/mitigation strategies, sustainability, and the incorporation of multiple types of data to solve complex problems). This activity was designed to be completed within one ~75 minute class meeting, although aspects of this activity can easily be modified to accommodate shorter class periods. In small groups, students examine one of five possible proposed sites for the facility, evaluating it based on its described geologic, economic, and/or social criteria. Students are then scrambled into new, larger groups, in which representatives of all five proposed sites report their findings, and then the sites are collectively ranked in order of preference. Rankings between the larger groups are compared and discussed as a class, including topics such as a comparison of criteria and overall rankings, descriptions of most beneficial and most needed data, and comparison of the activity to "real-life" scenarios.

Students use a series of maps and natural hazard data to evaluate the risk to a building structure of their choice in the state of California. For each hazard, students rate the potential risk in two dimensions: (1) Probability - probability that a hazardous event "may" occur, and (2) Severity of Impact - the size of the impact in terms of cost and impact on human health.

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This module introduces students to the fundamental principles and uses of electrical resistivity, with a focus on an environmental application. Students explore the characteristics and environmental setting of Harrier Meadow, a saltmarsh just outside of New York City. They investigate the relationship between electrical resistivity and physical properties of the soil in the marsh. Students also discover how variations in survey configuration parameters control investigation depth (how far into the ground the signals sense) and spatial resolution (what size objects can be detected). Finally, students learn about and then perform geophysical inversion, which is the process of estimating the geophysical properties of the subsurface from geophysical observations. In the final unit of the module, students evaluate the extent to which the geophysical dataset and direct physical measurements support the hypothesis, introduced in Unit 1, accounting for the distribution of Pickleweed in Harrier Meadow.
This module is intended to require approximately 2-3 weeks of class time. Teaching material includes PowerPoints that may be used in lectures or provided for self-guided learning, exercises, and handouts that ask students to synthesize what they learn from the exercises. In addition, multiple choice and short answer questions can be given to students as homework, on quizzes, or on exams.

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In this in-class exercise, students compare several lines of evidence that support the ideas of continental drift and plate tectonics. Before the class meeting, each student is given a preparation assignment in which he/she studies one "continental drift" and one "ocean floor data" map. In class, students divide into teams of 3, with each team member having prepared different specialties. They discuss their respective maps and look for spatial patterns among the data.

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This assignment is best presented in two lab periods to represent the "before" and "after" scenarios of land use and their impact on hydrology. It requires documentation in map and/or airphoto form of land use in a specific watershed at two times: historical and modern. Historical USGS topographic maps from the 19th century were used in this case, along with digital orthophotos for the modern-day scenario. Some means of quantifying subareas within the watershed is also needed, either using software (ArcGIS) or transparent overlays and boxcounting from a translucent grid would work.
For each of the sets of documentation: historical and modern, the students follow the USDA-NRCS TR55 empirical procedure to estimate event runoff depths and peak estimated discharge from the watershed. An area-weighted curve number (CN) is calculated based on tabulated categories of land use. Some judgment is involved in adapting the tabulated land use categories to the specific watershed used, and selecting an appropriate statistical average rainfall event to use. The sum of Darcy's Law calculations of discharge along streamtubes to a surface stream or estuary provides a groundwater discharge value over time for comparison. Each of these parts of the activity provides opportunities for the instructor to discuss uncertainties and sources of error.
Note that although software allowing TR-55 analysis exists, it is simpler and more instructive to have students use the paper method and forms in the manual.

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This activity is an investigation regarding evaporation and the factors that affect it.

This activity provides an opportunity for students to examine the evidence that supports climate change and engage in a classroom discussion and self-reflection on that experience and empower them to consider their own actions and how they can make changes in their life practices

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In this out of class tutorial, students explore several examples of natural selection and speciation.

In the first week of the course, students are introduced to the major groups of animals and single-celled eukaryotes that comprise most of the fossil record. At that time, each student selects one group (kingdom, phylum or class) of organism to be their special "pet" group for the rest of the semester. Several assignments are then tied to these groups, including this activity, which is a writing assignment directly following the class lectures on evolution and natural selection. Students are asked to use the scholarly article database GeoRef to locate a peer-reviewed journal article that describes research on the evolution of their "pet" group (or some specific member of it). After reading the article, students must write a 2-3 page summary and critique of it, applying concepts they have learned in the course to evaluate the scientific merits of the paper. If time permits, students are also invited to spend a few minutes presenting their summary and critique during class so that the students can learn about each other's "pets".

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This activity is designed for large freshman courses (>200 students) and is used in-class. The activity requires a short (15 minute) overview of Earth history before students have the opportunity to work through various questions and problems. Tasks include simple math problems, critical thinking questions, and include place-based examples of geological situations for Arizona and California.

Students completing the activity will have knowledge of Earth history, knowledge of some geological disasters, and will have learned several different perspectives of timescales that affect various events on Earth.

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A classroom/lab activity using the Paleobiology Database to produce and interpret diversity curves for various groups of important and popular extinct animals, such as trilobites, ammonites, and dinosaurs. Activity helps students appreciate ancient life, geological time, and the important of mass extinctions in shaping the history of life, and by extension the implications of current extinctions.
Outcomes:

Research how extinct animals lived, what they looked like, when they lived, and when they went extinct.
Observe the geological timescale, name three geological eras, and use them to understand geological time.
Name five major mass extinctions and relate them to the eras in which they occurred.
Use the Paleobiology Database to produce diversity curves for an important group of extinct animals.
Interpret graphs of diversity curves to understand the importance of mass extinctions in the history of life.
(Optional) Communicate results of study to peers in class. In the process, synthesize information on multiple extinct animal groups to better appreciate the importance of extinctions in earth history.

Many papers by Ken McClay and colleagues have established the value of scale-model experiments in understanding the evolution and geometries of extensional fault systems (e.g. T. Dooley and K.R. McClay, 1997, Analogue modeling of pull-apart basins: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 81, no.11, p. 1804 -- 1826).

There are few resources available that help students visualize the dynamic nature of faulting, especially the complex interplay of faults during growth and evolution of a fault system. Such an understanding is critical, however, if students are to think meaningfully about fault geometries and what they imply.

Conducting scale-model experiments in a class setting is useful, but very time-consuming, difficult for all students to see well, and very temporary, except for the end product. Accordingly, taking a cue from a movie produced by Ken McClay, I constructed a deformation apparatus, conducted and filmed several experiments conducted by McClay, and then produced QuickTime movies of the experiments. This approach makes it possible for students to observe an experiment in a minute or two that took 30-45 minutes to produce and to view the experiment repeatedly, so as to become very familiar with all that is taking place.

Individual frames from the movie provide a template on which students can identify the sequence of fault development, rotation of features, and cessation of motion on some faults as they become inactive. Requiring students to document their observations, establish a chronological sequence of events, and explain in writing what happens during the experiment results in an increased awareness of the faulting process.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Many papers by Ken McClay and colleagues have established the value of scale-model experiments in understanding the evolution and geometries of extensional fault systems (e.g. T. Dooley and K.R. McClay, 1997, Analogue modeling of pull-apart basins: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 81, no.11, p. 1804 -- 1826).

There are few resources available that help students visualize the dynamic nature of faulting, especially the complex interplay of faults during growth and evolution of a fault system. Such an understanding is critical, however, if students are to think meaningfully about fault geometries and what they imply.

Conducting scale-model experiments in a class setting is useful, but very time-consuming, difficult for all students to see well, and very temporary, except for the end product. Accordingly, taking a cue from a movie produced by Ken McClay, I constructed a deformation apparatus, conducted and filmed several experiments conducted by McClay, and then produced QuickTime movies of the experiments. This approach makes it possible for students to observe an experiment in a minute or two that took 30-45 minutes to produce and to view the experiment repeatedly, so as to become very familiar with all that is taking place.

Individual frames from the movie provide a template on which students can identify the sequence of fault development, rotation of features, and cessation of motion on some faults as they become inactive. Requiring students to document their observations, establish a chronological sequence of events, and explain in writing what happens during the experiment results in an increased awareness of the faulting process.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

The evolution of ideas is often ignored in the teaching of statistics. It is important to show students how definitions and formulas evolve. This activity describes a fairly straightforward activity of how measures of association can evolve.

For this written assignment, the students outline the evolution of
whales from land dwelling animals to aquatic beasts. Rather than an
essay, they produce a detailed outline of the major modifications that
occurred during this transition, such as hearing, propulsion, shape,
limbs, and several others. They start with Start with Pakicetidae and
end with Mysticeti and Odontoceti lines. For each fossil species, they
describe the fossil, discuss the anatomic modification for living in an
aquatic environment, indicate the environment where the animal lived,
and the give the time range.

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