There is a growing need for public understanding about groundwater resources. Knowing what groundwater and aquifers are is fundamental to understanding more complex issues such as groundwater quality and availability.  However, groundwater and related concepts are among the topics that instructors most struggle to teach.  Although constructivist theories suggest that students’ preconceptions or misconceptions can be used as teaching tools, the question about exactly how remains.  A resource perspective on this question states the first step involves understanding students’ preconceptions. To gain a deeper understanding of college students’ pre-instructional mental models about groundwater residence, 215 students enrolled in introductory-level environmental geoscience courses taught at two large US state universities were surveyed.  An open-ended questionnaire asked participants to draw and label a concept sketch.  Follow-up interviews asked participants to elaborate upon their concept sketches.  Eight categories of mental models emerged from the analysis of the collected data. These results were interpreted through the lens of cognitive schema theory, which generated to four patterns of mental models.  These patterns emphasize key aspects of students’ pre-instructional mental models about groundwater residence.  Instructors can use this information to design instructional activities about groundwater and aquifers using a resource perspective.

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Communicating even fundamental scientific concepts can be challenging. Furthermore, student mental models are often difficult to uncover even by the most talented teacher or researcher. Drawing is a universal process skill widely used by scientists to refine their conceptions about a wide range of topics, communicate ideas, and advance scientific thought in their disciplines. Just as drawing is useful to scientists for refining their conceptions, it has the potential to be useful for revealing misconceptions when teaching from a conceptual change perspective of science students’ mental models. Using a design study methodology and framed within the knowledge integration perspective of conceptual change, this longitudinal study investigates the efficacy of a delimited-sketch activity on the conceptual change of novices’ mental models about groundwater residence. A delimited-sketch activity, the focal case of this study, involves (i) students drawing to expand upon a provided partially-drawn concept sketch and then (ii) collectively debriefing the ideas communicated in the completed student-expanded concept sketches. The activity’s efficacy at facilitating conceptual change is tested with two different sample populations at two different large public universities in the USA. The first population is drawn from an introductory-level college geoscience course designed for non-science majors and the second population is drawn from a similar course designed for science majors. The activity has a large significant impact on moving students away from novice-like toward more expert-like conceptions of groundwater residence. The impact is observed even two months after the activity concludes.