INSIGHTS GAINED THROUGH DEVELOPMENT OF PALEONTOLOGY OUTREACH KITS FOR RAPID CITY MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS

Paleontology is a highly effective gateway to science education, making it ideal for outreach. With this in mind, the authors, in collaboration with the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Paleontology Club, developed teaching kits designed to educate middle-school students about dinosaurs and paleontology. The self-contained kits, designed to be mobile and easily implemented, include all materials necessary for delivering a lesson illustrating which dinosaurs lived during particular geologic time periods. Scale models of exemplar dinosaur from all Mesozoic time periods are accompanied by fact sheets. The fact sheets, presented in "comic book" style, present aspects of each Mesozoic period, including age, paleogeography, local geology, flora and fauna. Dinosaurs from each period are given a general description and students are prompted to identify example taxa from each time period. The kits were implemented with 124 eighth-grade students from South Middle School in Rapid City. Cognition of material was measured through concept inventories administered before and after lesson implementation. Student responses to ten questions gauged knowledge of and confidence with the material pre- and post-lesson. Students showed cognitive improvement in understanding of several paleontologic concepts presented in the kits. Students were initially aware of some paleontologic concepts, such as continent movement, but were generally unaware of changes in dinosaur associations throughout the Mesozoic or showed reduced familiarity with less "charismatic" dinosaur taxa.