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We teach earth, ecological, and environmental sciences in and about places imbued with meaning by human experience. Scientific understanding is but one of the many types of meanings that can accrue to a given place. People develop emotional attachments to meaningful places. The sense of place, encompassing the meanings and attachments that places hold for people, has been well characterized in environmental psychology. Its components, place attachment and place meaning, can be measured psychometrically. Place-based science teaching focuses on local and regional environments and synthesizes different ways of knowing them, leveraging the senses of place of students and teachers. Place-based teaching has been advocated for its relevance and potential to attract underrepresented groups to science. We posit that sense of place is a measurable learning outcome of place-based science teaching. We developed an Arizona-based, culturally inclusive, meaning-rich introductory geology course, and used published surveys to assess place attachment and meaning in students who took the course. We observed significant gains in student place attachment and place meaning, indicating that these instruments are generalizable and sensitive enough for use in this context. Sense of place should be engaged by teachers of place-based science, and further explored as an assessment measure. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed92:1042–1057, 2008 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geochronology and geochemistry are critical tools in geoscience research and research training, but students and faculty at many institutions have little or no access to the specialized and expensive facilities needed for sample preparation and analysis. Here, we explore whether a community laboratory, dedicated to hosting and training visitors, can help address this inequity by increasing access to specialized geochemical techniques and the resulting data. We report the first three years of outcomes from the Community Cosmogenic Facility, the goal of which is to improve access by making an increasingly important analytic technique more widely available. Although the facility we describe here focuses on cosmogenic nuclide sample preparation, the model we present is viable across the geosciences. Three years of development, assessment, and refinement demonstrate that the community laboratory model increased technique access to undergraduate and graduate students. Women were represented in first‐authored, peer‐reviewed papers at a rate nearly twice that of the broader community. In contrast, the participation of under‐represented groups did not increase over geoscience norms. Our data clearly illustrate that challenges to fostering a diverse geoscience community persist. Proactive interaction with faculty and students at Minority Serving Institutions, cohort‐focused training models, and financial support to visit community laboratories may be future steps toward further diversifying users of community facilities. Key Points: Many members of the geoscience community lack access to the specialized laboratories needed for geochronology and geochemistryCommunity laboratories, dedicated to training and hosting visitors, are a promising and efficient means to provide more equitable accessData for one community laboratory shows that while access improved, participation by groups under‐represented in geosciences remains limited [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graybody materials exhibit systematically low emissivity across their spectrum. This characteristic violates the key assumption of unit emissivity at some wavenumber in the spectrum used to calibrate thermal‐infrared emission data. This assumption makes graybody materials "appear colder" than their actual physical temperature and imparts a slope in emission spectra that is non‐physical in nature, both of which affect interpretations of planetary surfaces. Pyrrhotite derived from the Stillwater Complex's J‐M Reef in Montana, USA exhibits systemic graybody behavior across its mid‐infrared spectrum and thus has a steep negative spectral slope from high to low wavenumbers when calibrated using conventional methods. A new measurement technique is introduced for deriving the absolute emissivity of graybody materials using reference samples with known Christiansen Frequencies during calibration. The reference temperature method significantly reduces the spectral slope of and provides a more accurate estimation of the absolute emissivity of graybody materials. After correcting the temperature of pyrrhotite using results from a series of reference experiments, we conclude that the emission spectrum of pyrrhotite is spectrally featureless and has a maximum emissivity of ∼0.7. If sulfide mineral deposits are exposed on Mars, they will not be identified using spectral features found in the mid‐infrared (5–40 μm). However, they could be located by identifying basaltic terrain that appears colder than their surroundings and with apparent emissivity spectra that exhibit negative spectral slopes from high to low wavenumbers and are spectrally neutral. Plain Language Summary: An integral step to off‐Earth human settlement is identifying the minerals with the critical metals required to support a new form of human life in space that would be heavily dependent on robotics and technology. This work investigates whether remote thermal infrared emission spectroscopy can be used to identify extraterrestrial sulfide mineral deposits. For this purpose, we acquired emissivity measurements of a 100% pure sulfide (pyrrhotite; Fe(1−x)S) derived from the Stillwater Complex's J‐M Reef. We show that when deriving emissivity using the conventional calibration routine, pyrrhotite's spectrum exhibits a steep spectral slope and is nearly featureless. The slope results from an incorrect estimation of pyrrhotite's temperature. The temperature error stems from pyrrhotite exhibiting systematically low emissivity, which violates the key assumption that somewhere in its spectrum that the emissivity is equal to that of a blackbody at the same temperature. A new laboratory procedure was developed to constrain the temperature error and produce a more accurate emissivity spectrum of pyrrhotite, revealing that pyrrhotite exhibits low emissivity in the mid‐infrared. Rather than relying on absorption features for prospecting, temperature errors, the presence of a spectral slope, and a featureless spectrum can be used to prospect for sulfide mineral deposits across the solar system. Key Points: We developed a new calibration and measurement technique for deriving the absolute emissivity of graybody materials in the mid‐infraredPyrrhotite is spectrally neutral and exhibits systematic graybody behavior, with a maximum absolute emissivity of ∼0.7–0.6 from 5 to 40 μmAnomalously cold brightness temperatures and sloped, featureless emissivity spectra may indicate the presence of sulfide deposits on Mars [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical thinking and scientific reasoning are central to higher education in the United States, but many courses (in-person and online) teach students information about science much more than they teach the actual process of science and its associated knowledge and skills. In the online arena specifically, the tools available for course construction exacerbate this problem by making it difficult to build the types of active learning activities that research shows to be the most effective. Here, we present a report on Habitable Worlds, offered by Arizona State University for 12 semesters over the past 6 years. This is a unique online course that uses an array of novel technologies to deliver an active, inquiry-driven learning experience. Learning outcomes and quantitative data from more than 3000 students demonstrate the success of our approach but also identify several remaining challenges. The design and development of this course offers valuable lessons for instructional designers and educators who are interested in fully capitalizing on the capabilities of 21st-century technology to achieve educational goals. Key Words: Online education-Active learning-SETI-Astrobiology-Teaching. Astrobiology 17, 86-99. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]