2015/09/01 by Jeanne Lambert Sumrall, Renee M. Clary, Joshua C. Watson · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Social Sciences · #Diverse Educational Innovations Studies #Geography Education and Pedagogy #Indigenous and Place-Based Education
paper · doi:10.2505/4/jcst15_045_01_36
crossref issued 2015/09/01 · crossref published 2015/09/01 · crossref published-print 2015/09/01 · openalex publication_date 2015/09/01 · crossref created 2015/09/29 · crossref published-online 2024/12/02 · crossref deposited 2024/12/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
In relation to the constructivist learning theory, it is imperative to understand what a student may already know for this knowledge to be used as a scaffold for further education. The online classroom offers a unique and challenging environment for the evaluation of a student's previous knowledge, especially in the field of geosciences where knowledge may be associated with geographic affiliation. Knowing an individual's geographic affiliation may be useful in evaluating a student's previous knowledge. To test this hypothesis, students in an online master's program were given presurveys to evaluate their previous knowledge in meteorology and geology, as well as geological and meteorological sense-of-place surveys (Clary & Wandersee, 2006; Clary, Wandersee, & Sumrall, 2013). Students were then categorized by geographic regions within the United States. Results suggest that there were no statistical differences between the regions when the total presurvey scores were compared. However, when individual questions that were geared toward specific regions were analyzed, statistical differences were found between certain regions.