Help for Students Struggling with Radiometric Dating

A guest post by Matt Taylor

A little over a year ago, I developed an instructional video that aims to help students understand evolutionary trees (and we wrote a post about it here).

Several months later, Mariëlle updated me on the video and sent a request: “I posted the ‘How to read an evolutionary tree’ movie you made earlier this year, and my students have really benefited from it. I think the next topic should be ‘How to solve all three types of radiometric dating problems.'” 

Students do have trouble with radiometric dating problems, so I developed a video that describes this method of dating fossils. Halfway through the video, I turn to three sample problems: calculating a fossil’s age, calculating the percent of a radiometric isotope remaining in a fossil, and calculating an isotope’s half-life.

I hope you and your students find it helpful!

If you notice any errors, or if you have suggestions for other instructional videos, then please let me know in the comments section.