Features and Benefits
Personalize learning with Mastering Geology
Mastering™ Geology is an online homework, tutorials, and assessment program designed to work with this text to engage students and improve results. Interactive, self-paced coaching activities provide individualized coaching to help students stay on track. With a wide range of activities available, students can actively learn, understand, and retain even the most difficult earth science concepts.
BEFORE CLASS
- eText 2.0 optimized for mobile:
- eText 2.0 mobile app offers offline access and can be downloaded for most iOS and Android phones/tablets from the Apple App Store or Google Play
- Seamlessly integrated SmartFigure videos and animations
- Accessible (screen-reader ready)
- Configurable reading settings, including resizable type and night reading mode
- Instructor and student note-taking, highlighting, bookmarking, and searching capabilities
- Quick Response (QR) codes link to over 200 videos and animations, giving readers immediate access to five types of dynamic media, including Project Condor Quadcopter Videos, Mobile Field Trips, Tutorials, Animations, and Videos to help visualize physical processes and concepts. SmartFigures bring the print book to life.
- Dynamic Study Modules help students study effectively on their own by continuously assessing their understanding and performance in real time. Here's how it works: students complete a set of questions with a unique answer format that also asks them to indicate their confidence level. Questions repeat until the student can answer them all correctly and confidently. Once completed, Dynamic Study Modules explain the concepts, helping reinforce student learning. These are available as graded assignments prior to class, and accessible on smartphones, tablets, and computers. NEW! Instructors can now remove questions from Dynamic Study Modules to better fit their course.
DURING CLASS
- Learning Catalytics™ helps instructors generate class discussion, customize lecture, and promote peer-to-peer learning with real-time analytics. As a student response tool, Learning Catalytics uses students’ smartphones, tablets, or laptops to engage them in more interactive tasks and thinking, including sketching, ranking, word clouds, image upload, and other interactive activity types. Instructors can:
- Upload a full PowerPoint® deck for easy creation of slide questions.
- Access a full library of questions specific to the of 15th Edition of Tarbuck’s Earth Science.
- Manage peer-to-peer learning without worrying about case-sensitive names when students join a team.
AFTER CLASS
- 10 SmartFigure Project Condor Quadcopter Videos bring earth science to life for students. Three geologists, using a quadcopter-mounted GoPro camera, ventured into the field to film 10 key geologic locations and processes. These process-oriented videos, accessed through QR codes, are designed to bring the field to the classroom and improve the learning experience within the text. In Mastering Geology, these videos are accompanied by assessments to test students’ understanding.
- 24 SmartFigure Mobile Field Trips take students to iconic locations with geologist–pilot–photographer Michael Collier in the air and on the ground to learn about iconic landscapes in North America and beyond that relate to discussions in the chapter. These extraordinary field trips are accessed by using QR codes throughout the text. New Mobile Field Trips for the 15th edition include: Formation of a Water Gap, Ice Sculpts Yosemite, Fire and Ice Land, Dendrochronology, and Desert Geomorphology. In Mastering, these videos are accompanied by auto-gradable assessments that track what students have learned.
- Brief animations created by text illustrator Dennis Tasa animate a process or concept depicted in the textbook’s figures. With QR codes, students are given a view of moving figures rather than static art to depict how geologic processes move throughout time.
- Brief tutorial videos present students with a 3- to 4-minute feature (mini lesson), most narrated and annotated by Professor Callan Bentley. Each lesson examines and explains the concepts illustrated by the figure. With over 150 SmartFigure Tutorials inside the text, students have a multitude of ways to enjoy art that teaches.
MapMaster 2.0 activities are inspired by GIS and allow students to layer various thematic maps to analyze spatial patterns and data at regional and global scales. Now fully mobile, activities include enhanced analysis tools, such as split screen, the ability for students to geolocate themselves in the data, and the ability for students to upload their own data for advanced map making. This tool includes zoom and annotation functionality, with hundreds of map layers leveraging recent data from sources such as NOAA, NASA, USGS, United Nations, CIA, World Bank, UN, PRB, and more.