Dr. Laura Lukes, Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, has been honored with the Outstanding Paper Award 2025 selected by the Journal of Geoscience Education, the leading international journal for research on how geoscience is taught and learned. 

The award-winning article, co-authored by Dr. Lukes, is titled The geoscience education research (GER) community of practice: a brief history and implications from a needs assessment survey. With more than 1,000 views as of August 2025, it is already making a significant impact.

The article is a 10-year follow up to a landmark 2015 paper led by Dr. Lukes, Creating a community of practice around geoscience education research: NAGT-GER, which defined geoscience education research (GER) and its community of practice in discipline-based education research (DBER). 

The new study examines how the GER community has grown over the past decade since the founding of the GER Division of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). Drawing on survey responses from 107 GER community members, the research identifies where the community is and what it needs to grow. Importantly, it fills in gaps from the foundational disciplinary DBER Report and helps establish the status and future directions of geoscience DBER in advance of the upcoming “Status of the Field of Discipline-Based Education Research” workshop, organized by the US National Academies of Sciences and scheduled in November 2025.

By receiving this award, Dr. Lukes and her co-authors have not only contributed to the ‘advancement of the discipline of geoscience education’ but also provided an important resource to represent geoscience education in the broader DBER conversation.