ABOUT NEOGEO

Through the enhancement of existing educational partnerships between Kent State University and the Stark County Educational Services Center, the goal of the NEOGEO project is to enhance middle and high school Earth Science education by introducing educators and students to inquiry-based earth science and geospatial technology. Ten GK-12 Fellows  from the departments of Geography and Geology are collaborating with middle and high school teachers in Stark County, Northeast Ohio. Fellows help implement inquiry-based science and the associated understanding of Earth system processes by developing inquiry-based curriculum modules based on analysis of the local environment using field methods and on-line geospatial databases.

Our approach is to partner overlapping pairs of Fellows  with teams of teachers comprising entire science departments of targeted Stark County schools. In this way, we aim to directly impact approximately 40 middle and high school science teachers per year and their approximately  5,000 students. Partnering pairs of Fellows with teams of teachers is a powerful approach that we hope will allow rapid institutionalization through dissemination of learned techniques, peer support, and administrative “buy-in”.

Organizational and Conceptual structure of the GK-12 program (click to enlarge diagram)