This thesis is a record of two research strands that have been intertwined during the development over a four year period of a classroom curriculum for an elective Geology 12 course in a new school. It discusses traditional belief systems identified as common to the practice of senior science and how one teacher wanted to challenge those beliefs to produce a working curriculum that would focus on long term learning within the framework of an externally prescribed curriculum and a provincially mandated external final exam that counted for 40% of the students mark. The teacher, working on her own in a portable for the first two years was in the unenviable position of being supplied with textbooks with a foreign focus and with supplies that as the title suggests were of little use over the long term. By Christmas of the first year a number of major problems had been identified, these problems falling into two major categories - developing strategies for long term learning that, within the operational constraints of grade 12, would enable the students to take far more responsibility for their own learning, and second, developing a science research programme for acquiring the resources, principally through field work, that were identified as being necessary for the programme. The major concerns within these two problem areas were identified and a four year timeline was developed for implementation. On the pedagogical side, after examining some of the literature on learning, particularly that around the area of cooperative learning that has had a substantial focus in recent years in a number of local school districts, reflecting on what worked for me in terms of my practice over 27 years of science teaching, I chose to focus on the Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL), out of Monash University, Australia as my working framework for learning. The process of developing this classroom curriculum was framed as a qualitative individual action research project over time as, within my professional life, there were no other teachers involved with the geology programme within the school, and at the same time being in a portable isolated me from my peers-l had no choice but to be self contained and self reliant. The pedagogical side of the process saw the evolvement of a programme that differed significantly in many ways from traditional senior science teaching. This is not to say that many teachers are not already reflecting on and trying to improve practice but for most of them it is through quiet reflection, discourse and evolution much as it had been for me until this time. For me this was the first time in my career that I was able to develop a programme from the very beginning. The thesis details the development of a multi-level learning strategy with an underlying theme being the development of more metacognitive students. The programme entails the identification of prior learning, reflective and collaborative practice, multiple processings of content and skills, peer assessment, and semi-formal reflective assessment. For many students, particularly during my first two years, most of these strategies were completely foreign to their cultural expectations of the teacher's role as dispenser of information to be regurgitated back through formal assessment. During the last two years these challenges to student thinking have been far less dramatic as I am now a known quantity in the school and the students taking my course expect to be working at becoming more independent long term learners. The programme is also built on the premise that for geology, relevant hands-on activities are an integral part of the learning process, and this other research strand is also explored and described. This is the story of the two research strands by which a semi-independent multi-level learning environment has been developed and implemented with a high degree of hands-on activities. Although a formal assessment of the programme is almost impossible to do within the constraints of my working environment, the personal feedback that I receive from the students, parents and colleagues indicates that it has been successful.

This thesis is a record of two research strands that have been intertwined during the development over a four year period of a classroom curriculum for an elective Geology 12 course in a new school. It discusses traditional belief systems identified as common to the practice of senior science and how one teacher wanted to challenge those beliefs to produce a working curriculum that would focus on long term learning within the framework of an externally prescribed curriculum and a provincially mandated external final exam that counted for 40% of the students mark. The teacher, working on her own in a portable for the first two years was in the unenviable position of being supplied with textbooks with a foreign focus and with supplies that as the title suggests were of little use over the long term. By Christmas of the first year a number of major problems had been identified, these problems falling into two major categories - developing strategies for long term learning that, within the operational constraints of grade 12, would enable the students to take far more responsibility for their own learning, and second, developing a science research programme for acquiring the resources, principally through field work, that were identified as being necessary for the programme. The major concerns within these two problem areas were identified and a four year timeline was developed for implementation. On the pedagogical side, after examining some of the literature on learning, particularly that around the area of cooperative learning that has had a substantial focus in recent years in a number of local school districts, reflecting on what worked for me in terms of my practice over 27 years of science teaching, I chose to focus on the Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL), out of Monash University, Australia as my working framework for learning. The process of developing this classroom curriculum was framed as a qualitative individual action research project over time as, within my professional life, there were no other teachers involved with the geology programme within the school, and at the same time being in a portable isolated me from my peers-l had no choice but to be self contained and self reliant. The pedagogical side of the process saw the evolvement of a programme that differed significantly in many ways from traditional senior science teaching. This is not to say that many teachers are not already reflecting on and trying to improve practice but for most of them it is through quiet reflection, discourse and evolution much as it had been for me until this time. For me this was the first time in my career that I was able to develop a programme from the very beginning. The thesis details the development of a multi-level learning strategy with an underlying theme being the development of more metacognitive students. The programme entails the identification of prior learning, reflective and collaborative practice, multiple processings of content and skills, peer assessment, and semi-formal reflective assessment. For many students, particularly during my first two years, most of these strategies were completely foreign to their cultural expectations of the teacher's role as dispenser of information to be regurgitated back through formal assessment. During the last two years these challenges to student thinking have been far less dramatic as I am now a known quantity in the school and the students taking my course expect to be working at becoming more independent long term learners. The programme is also built on the premise that for geology, relevant hands-on activities are an integral part of the learning process, and this other research strand is also explored and described. This is the story of the two research strands by which a semi-independent multi-level learning environment has been developed and implemented with a high degree of hands-on activities. Although a formal assessment of the programme is almost impossible to do within the constraints of my working environment, the personal feedback that I receive from the students, parents and colleagues indicates that it has been successful. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Errata is tipped in after contents. / Bibliography: p. 249-264. / iv, 264 p. : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Geology, 1997?

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used to acquaint geoscience novices with some of the observation, data gathering, and problem solving done in actual field situations by geoscientists. VR environments in a variety of forms are used to prepare students for doing geologic fieldwork, as well as to provide proxies for such experience when venturing into the field is not possible. However, despite increased use of VR for these purposes, there is little research on how students learn using these environments, how using them impacts student field experience, or what constitutes effective design in light of emerging theories of geocognition. To address these questions, I investigated the design and use of a virtual reality environment in a professional development program for middle school Earth science teachers called Teachers on the Leading Edge (TOTLE). This environment, called a virtual field environment, or VFE, was based largely on the field sites visited by the participants during summer workshops. It was designed as a tool to prepare the participants for workshop field activities and as a vehicle for taking elements of that experience back to their students. I assessed how effectively the VFE accomplished these goals using a quasi-experimental, mixed method study that involved a series of teaching experiments, interviews, participant surveys, and focus groups. The principle conclusions reached in this study are as follows: 1. In a field trip orientation experiment involving 35 middle school teachers, 90.6% of the participants stated a preference for VFE enhanced orientation over an alternative orientation that used photographs and static maps to complete a practice field activity. When asked about how the VFE prepared them for their field experience, the participants ranked it as most helpful for visualize the location and geography of the field sites. They ranked it lower for helping them visualize structural and geomorphic patterns, and ranked it as least helpful in developing conceptual links between the geology at individual field sites and regional geologic structure and processes. 2. According to workshop follow-up surveys, 23% of the first year participants and 40% of the second year participants used the VFE with their own classes. While factors cited for not using the VFE provided some information relevant to the larger question of technology use in classroom, individual reports of how teachers used the VFE in their classes provided limited information about student interaction with the virtual environment. 3. Interviews with 85 community college students (novices), geologists (experts), and middle school Earth science instructors (teachers) revealed no significant difference in the features of interest selected from a virtual field site. Though experts tended to ask slightly more complicated and higher order questions than the other two groups, there was no statistically significant difference in the questions asked about these features in regards to topical characteristics, cognitive outcome, or cognitive type. In addition to some insights into cognitive differences between these groups, the interviews also provided information about visual selection, perception, and processing which are valuable to VFE scene design.