Recruiting undergraduate students is a significant challenge for undergraduate geography programs. Few students have robust exposure to geography in secondary school and the major has low name recognition for entering first year students. In fact, geography is often a "found" major on many campuses with students coming to the major after…

The field of geography especially lends itself to fieldwork, getting students out of the classrooms and into the real world. Furthermore, studies have shown that when traditional lecture style is replaced at least in part with approaches that incorporate active learning, students earn higher examination grades and have a greater chance of passing…

The abundance of freely available, scientific big data sets can facilitate discovery-based authentic science projects saving time, money, and effort. This is especially true of remotely sensed data, as there is global coverage of Earth's surface spanning several decades that can be used for a multitude of applications. In this article, I present…

Data-driven inquiry as a science practice and instructional approach can provide a powerful context for project-based learning (PBL). Students engage in data-driven inquiry when they explore a rich data set and observe patterns, ask questions suggested by the data, and pursue answers about underlying phenomena. Krajcik (2015) describes five…

: Bookmapped storytelling, a pedagogical approach designed by Terence W. Cavanaugh and Jerome Burg (2011), allows students to trace a character's trajectory on a digital map. The use of this digital tool in foreign language education and its effectiveness in helping students reach proficiency remains little studied. In this article I explore the…

Storm disasters are amplified in the coastal environment due to population pressures and the power of the sea. The upper-division/graduate university course "Coastal Storms" was designed to equip future practitioners with the skills necessary to understand, respond to, and mitigate for these natural disasters. To accomplish this, "Coastal Storms"…

In undergraduate geography programs in the United States there is increasing demand for students to be prepared for real-world project management and to possess strong GIS technical skills and cartographic communication skills upon graduation. There is, however, limited time and opportunity within the framework of traditional undergraduate…

Many geography and technology educators have been attracted to geospatial technologies because of the potential to help students develop and demonstrate spatial and higher order thinking skills, only to be frustrated with implementation at the school level. Even when teachers have overcome the technical hurdles of hardware, software, and data,…

Imagine soaring in the Earth's atmosphere to near the edge of space. Is there air to breathe? Is it dark? Are there clouds? What about air pressure? Fifth-grade students from Ferguson Elementary in Klamath Falls, Oregon, were wondering these questions as they participated in "To the Edge of Space," an exciting, yearlong collaborative…