The Physical Geology Lecture Tutorials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. They are intended for educational purposes only.

These “Lecture Tutorials” are designed as illustrative review of individual lectures, followed with a series of questions aimed at addressing student misconceptions. The general idea is that you lecture for 15-20 minutes, the students work through the lecture tutorials for 15-20 minutes, then the class discusses the answers together. These offer a consistent active learning formative assessment, and also act as study guides for students.

Updates in 2nd edition:

– New tutorials: Science, Cosmology, Mineral Categories, Climate Change, Energy Resources
– New “Think Deeper” sections offer higher-order thought provoking questions and activities for students to work on individually and in groups.
– corrected spelling/grammar errors
– corrected/updated to questions for clarification

The Tutorials:

Printable all-in-one book (.pdf) version (download this file and take it to a print shop to have it printed and bound together as a book)

Google Drive folder with all of the individual tutorials

Tutorials can also be accessed individually by clicking the links below:
Science
Cosmology
Earth
Plate Tectonics – History of a Theory
Plate Tectonics – Plate Boundary Types
Atoms and Minerals
Mineral Categories
Mineral Variation
Rock Cycle
Igneous rocks
Melts
Volcanoes
Weathering
Soils
Sediment and Sedimentary Rocks
Sedimentary Structures and Interpretation
Metamorphism Controls
Metamorphism Types
Stress and Strain
Folds
Faults
Earthquake Waves
Earthquake Hazards
Relative Age Principles
Unconformities
Numerical Ages
Mass Wasting Controls
Mass Wasting Prevention
Water Cycle
Streams
Floods
Groundwater Storage
Groundwater Contamination
Groundwater Geology
Glaciers and Ice Ages
Carbon Cycle
Climate Change
Energy Resources
Mineral Resources (coming soon)

Example ‘Illustrative Review’ Section:

Review sections contain illustrations which capture the salient points from a given subject area. Illustrations will often also have very brief explanations.

Example ‘Test Your Knowledge’ Section:

Test your knowledge sections are typically made up of multiple choice and true/false questions. The questions generally progress in level of difficulty, from very directly asking about the review content to questions that expand somewhat on the students knowledge base. At times the questions are based on illustrations unique from the review sections.

Example ‘Think Deeper’ Section:

Think deeper questions are often open ended thought provoking questions designed to further address misconceptions, and also to help students relate to the subject matter more directly. Some think deeper sections act more like learning activity worksheets, such as the second example below from the Floods lecture tutorial in which students calculate recurrence intervals, plot the data a project future flood potential.

Contact Me if you have any questions or suggestions. If you’re using these tutorials (1st or 2nd edtion) I would love to hear about your experiences and if you found them useful (or not) and why.

The figures are drafted in Illustrator, the atomic model images are produced in Vesta:

K. Momma and F. Izumi, “VESTA 3 for three-dimensional visualization of crystal, volumetric and morphology data,” J. Appl. Crystallogr., 44, 1272-1276 (2011).

I’m happy to share the native files (just ask).