CTS Guide: Plate Tectonics, pp 228-229- Section IV Research Summaries

Mountain Formation

• A study by Horizons Research identified several misconceptions related to mountain formation: All changes to Earth’s surface occur suddenly and rapidly; earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountain formation usually occur in the same general areas, but there is no explanation for this; and mountains form when earthquakes push the ground up (Ford and Taylor 2006).

• Some students have a landform and ocean basin conception that involves a progressively decreasing slope from the center of the continents to the center of the bottom of the ocean and then back up again (Marques and Thompson 1997).

• Students may think of mountain-building as occurring only through catastrophic events such as earthquakes or volcanoes. They often fail to recognize the slow process of uplift over millions of years (Phillips 1991).

• In summaries of several studies conducted by J. C. Happs in the early 1980s findings indicated that students have a variety of ideas about the composition of mountains and their formation. Children described mountains as “high rocks” or “clumps of dirt or soil.” Some students believed all mountains came from volcanoes or molten rock and some believed they were formed from “rock pushed up.” Happs’s studies revealed that most children in the study were unable to use a theory of mountain building that involved plate tectonics