Abstract
The talk will review research from an interdisciplinary project that combines cognitive science, science education, and geological practice. Findings include insights into new cognitive processes that come from research on expert reasoning about natural problems in geology, and new approaches to teaching students to reason about 3D structures from 2D diagrams, and to reason about unfamiliar temporal scales. The talk will present a new framework for communication and collaboration between cognitive scientists and disciplinary scientists that identifies three distinct domains of spatial reasoning and scientific models: geometric, kinematic, and dynamic. The framework may offer a way to think about how observations (data) in one domain may be used to make inferences in the other domains.