Earth Science Education #6. Lessons Learned: Organizing a Geoscience Outreach Program at the University of Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Geology Outreach at the University of Saskatchewan was initiated during the 2018/19 academic year as a free and informal education opportunity for K–12 educators and their students in Saskatchewan. The program was 100% volunteer-run by undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan. We estimate reaching more than 1000 students in Saskatoon and surrounding areas following two years of outreach offerings. Hands-on activities offered included ‘Rocks and Minerals’, ‘Fossils’, ‘Meteorite Impacts’ and ‘Volcanoes’ and also involved a tour of the Museum of Natural Sciences when completed on campus. The overall intent of these activities was to foster excitement about the Earth Sciences. Typically, Educators who booked our program taught grades 4–7, where the Earth Sciences are strongly represented in Saskatchewan’s science curriculum. Most outreach offerings occurred on the University of Saskatchewan campus, but some were offered remotely at elementary schools and various Girl Guides of Canada events. During the 2019/20 academic year, we booked every outreach event planned for that year within two days and had a waiting list of more than 30 teachers across the province. The demand for geoscience outreach in Saskatchewan is high, and we hope to continue providing engaging, relevant, and fun educational outreach opportunities. University departments across Canada should allocate funds for community and school outreach initiatives and hire science communicators to oversee programs such as this.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".