Unit composed of 3 exercises designed to expose students to the physical processes that lead to landslides and how scientists model these processes.

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This is a basic introductory online exercises that introduces students to landslides. Students complete a background reading about landslides in general and answer a series of questions. Students then complete a background reading about the numerous debris flows that occurred near Boulder, Colorado in 2013. Students determine answers to questions from the text as well as interpreting graphs and maps.

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This activity expands the watershed examined from a schoolyard to a large drainage that cannot be viewed from one location. The activity includes an examination of changing land uses within the drainage and discusses interactions between society and the environment. A number of supporting activities are provided for those students who need practice with topographic maps or learning to use various web resources.

This is a wrap-up exercise reviewing the properties of the most important igneous minerals in thin section.

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Provenance: Zebra Canyon, Utah. Photo by Diane Greer; used with permission.
Reuse: If you wish to use this item outside this site in ways that exceed fair use (see http://fairuse.stanford.edu/) you must seek permission from its creator.
Formative assessment questions using a classroom response system ("clickers") can be used to reveal students' spatial understanding. Students are shown this diagram and instructed to click in the box where they expect to find the same layer as the one labeled with a dot. Click on the image to see a larger version.

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This lecture/activity allows students to "play with" a toy Slinky in order to recognize the implications of an elastic rheology to deformation at shallow crustal levels. Building on already-covered concepts of elasticity and friction, this module adds seismic first motions and earthquake locations to the students conceptual tool bag. As such, this module can be used to segue into other areas of geophyics that are of importance in structural geology (e.g., active tectonics, hazards).

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This activity provides young students with a relevant model (a layer cake) to help them understand concepts about sedimentary rock layers (such as the Law of Superposition), correlation of the rock record with geologic time and relative ages of rocks and fossils.

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This exercise set explores marine sediments using core photos and authentic datasets in an inquiry-based approach. Students' prior knowledge of sea floor sediments is explored in Part 1. In Parts 2-3 students observe and describe the physical characteristics of sediment cores and determine the composition using smear slide data and a decision tree. In Part 4 students develop a map showing the distribution of the primary marine sediment types of the Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans and develop hypotheses to explain the distribution of the sediment types shown on their map.

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A recent report by the AAC&U (2002) advocates greater emphasis on educating students to be "intentional learners" who are purposeful and self-directing, empowered through intellectual and practical skills, informed by knowledge and ways of knowing, and responsible for personal actions and civic values. Self-directing learners also take initiative to diagnose their learning needs, they formulate learning goals, they select and implement learning strategies, and they evaluate their learning outcomes. It is commonly assumed that students will develop these sorts of skills, motivations, and attitudes in the course of mastering content, but this is not necessarily the case.

In an effort to help students develop these skills, Dexter Perkins and I began introducing a learning co-curriculum into our courses. This curriculum includes readings, classroom activities, discussions, and reflective journaling about learning. These activities not only provide a foundation for developing skills for life-long learning, they also provide scaffolding as students undertake greater responsibility for their own learning. Additionally, students now have a shared vocabulary about thinking and learning, they have a clearer understanding of our expectations for their learning (i.e., that student learning goals should go far beyond memorizing content), and they are more intentional about their own learning. Student motivations and attitudes have changed remarkably with the greater focus on thinking and learning. Furthermore, students more fully understand the value of their learning and their own development.

In Part 1 of this activity, students are provided with a blank topographic profile and an associated tectonic plate boundary map. Students are asked to draw a schematic cross-section on the profile down to the asthenosphere including tectonic plates (with relative thicknesses of crust etc. appropriately illustrated), arrows indicating directions of plate movement, tectonic features (mid-ocean ridges, trenches and volcanic arcs) and symbols indicating where melting is occurring at depth. In Part 2, students are asked to provide geological and geophysical lines of evidence to support their placement of convergent and divergent boundaries, respectively. A bonus question asks students to predict what would happen if spreading along the Atlantic mid-ocean ridge were to stop. Students are referred to appropriate sections of the textbook to guide them in completing all the parts of this activity. Students are also provided with a checklist of required elements for both parts of the assignment.

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In this activity, students are asked to consider three different rocks: granite, shale and schist. Can these rocks become one of the others through geologic processes? Students are asked to describe the relationships between the rock types, the geologic processes involved and the geologic evidence for these relationships. Diagrams to help support their answers are suggested but not required.

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Learning Assessment #3 is carried out over two class periods. Parts 1 and 2 are completed in the first period and part 3 in the second. The two parts are graded separately and have separate feedback activities.

Part 1 of this activity is on igneous rocks and processes. Students are provided with a cross-section and asked to describe the igneous processes that are occuring at 4 different locations marked on the cross-section. They must also describe the name, type (intrusive vs. extrusive) and chemistry (felsic vs. mafic) of igneous rock that would be forming at each location. A detailed geologic map is also provided.Part 2 of the activity is on sedimentary rocks and processes. Students must indicate on the same cross-section where each of the 3 major sedimentary processes is predominant (weathering/erosion, transport, deposition/lithification). For bonus marks, in the areas of deposition/lithification, students can indicate the type of sedimentary rock that would form (sandstone, shale or limestone).Part 3 of the activity asks students to interpret the geologic history of the Diasen Volcano, based the provided detailed geologic map (from Tamura et al. (2003); used with permission from the publisher). Students must describe the volcanic activity that would have been occurring and sketch a small schematic cross-section for four specified time periods.

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Given a schematic cross-section and some background information about numerical ages, Part 1 of this activity asks students to give the relative time sequence of 14 geological events. In Part 2, students must provide numerical age brackets for a number of geologic events and/or rock units. In Part 3, students are asked to explain their reasoning for their age bracket assignments in part 2, including the principles of relative age they employed. Students are provided with a copy of the geologic time scale (2009, Geological Society of America) to assist them in completing this activity.

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Based on a schematic diagram of an outcrop provided in the first question, students are asked to list the relative ages of the four different rock units and provide the reasoning behind their interpretation based on the principles of relative age and the processes involved in the formation of each rock. Students are told that there are two possible solutions and must describe both. The second part of question one asks students to describe the geologic evidence they would look for in the outcrop to determine which of the solutions was likely correct.

The second question of the assignment is about numerical age dating. Students are asked to list what could be dated in each rock (e.g. minerals, fossils) and which particular process during the formation of each rock would be dated in doing so.

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At the end of the semester, students are asked to create a concept map of the four main concepts covered over the duration of the course. They are provided with a grading rubric and 4 the main nodes that are required on the map (plate tectonics, the rock cycle, geologic time and scientific research). The four concepts can be arranged in any manner, and the connecting lines must be labelled with appropriate terms and examples. Students have the option of creating a paper map (11'' x 17'' or larger) or a digital map using a free software program, VUE.

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Given a cross-sectional diagram of two rock outcrops (From Earth: Portrait of a Planet 4th edition by Stephan Marshak. Copyright �� 2012, 2008, 2005, 2001 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.), Part 1 of this activity asks students to sketch a fault structure that would explain the rock configuration. Labels for all important parts of the fault are required (hanging wall, foot wall, arrows indicating movement and the maximum stress direction). The fault must be identified as either normal or reverse. Only one of two possible solutions is required.

Given a map template, Part 2 asks students to sketch a geological map of the outcrops based on their fault from Part 1. Required elements include all lithological contacts, strike/dip symbols, structural labels and a proper legend.

Part 3 of this activity gives students the same schematic cross-section as in Part 1, except now they have to draw folds that would explain the rock configuration. Labels for the hinge line, axial plane and maximum stress direction must be included.

These files contain a set of three Excel files to balance mineral reactions, to explore variation of thermodynamic properties as a function of P, T and composition and to explore stability of different mineral reactions using the popular thermodynamic databases of Berman and Holland and Powell. A set of instructions as well as some suggested exercises are included as Word files. This allows students with little knowledge of thermodynamics to explore stability quantitatively (e.g. to see what metastable and stable mean); students learning thermodynamics can see the workings of the databases from the "inside" and explore various properties including thermodynamic mixing behavior and non-ideality using simple models. The material can be used to accompany students from fairly introductory courses to advanced thermodynamics courses.

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Students will be presented with a problem; that is to determine the general characteristics (stratigraphy, water table depth) of a heterogeneous deposit (glacial till south of the MSU campus or proglacial sediments south of Ludington, MI) using electrical resistivity methods. The project consists of three separate activities: 1) use laboratory experiments to measure the relationship between soil water content and electrical resistivity for different soil samples obtained from the sites (2-3 samples per group), 2) use simple modeling software to calculate the resistivity response for simple geological models, based on information from well logs and the results of the laboratory measurements, and 3) design (min-max a-spacing and stepsize, based on the forward modeling results), execute, and analyze a field sounding experiment. Results will be summarized in a report and presented in class.
Uses geophysics to solve problems in other fields

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This is a set of five exercises that teach the basic skills of using Perplex and the possible types of understanding one can gain from the use of internally-consistent thermodynamic databases. The exercises culminate in the creation of a pseudosection for a particular rock.

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The concept and name of "lecture tutorials" are not original but come from Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Geoscience (2012) by Kortz and Smay. These authors define a lecture tutorial as "a short worksheet that students complete in class, making the lecture more interactive."
Tutorials were added to a specific course to incorporate interactivity, hold student attention throughout a class session, improve student understanding, and increase attendance. The results are presented in more detail in the Instructors Notes, but adding tutorials to lectures has generally accomplished the goals listed above. The number of lectures with tutorials has increased since the first term of use.
This activity contains 26 tutorials, one for each lecture in the course. However, not every tutorial is used in every semester; they are rotated from year to year. Some tutorials are used but not collected for grading.
The accompanying PowerPoint slides may be incorporated into the lectures. These slides are written for the clicker option but can also be used with physical handouts after some modification.

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