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Hello all, Tim Shipley, Steve Semken and I are convening a session at GSA next fall on temporal and spatial thinking in the geosciences. We hope that many of you will submit abstracts on your work to this session, and that you will help us spread the word about the session. Here are the details: Title: T167. Time, Events, and Places: Understanding Temporal and Spatial Learning in Geoscience Education Students have trouble visualizing large magnitudes and reasoning about events and processes over large temporal and spatial scales. Part of the problem arises when the cognitive mechanisms that serve us well for human scale reasoning are used to interpret phenomena and structures in time and space that dwarf human experience, as is routine in the Earth and space science research and education. This session will present work on how humans think about events, processes, histories, and familiar spaces. This cognitive science research offers an important perspective on the difficulties that students encounter in learning about time and space and reasoning about spatiotemporal concepts in the context of geoscience education. The session will combine basic work on learning with work on educating about deep time and change in formal and informal learning settings. We hope to see you there! All the best, Carol -------------------------------------------------- Carol Ormand Science Education Resource Center Carleton College Northfield, MN 55057 (608) 213-1618