A SKILLS MATRIX AS A GEOLOGY DEPARTMENT CURRICULUM PLANNING TOOL

Faculty members of the Carleton College have developed a matrix of skills covered in geology courses with several objectives:

• Geology majors should begin their "senior integrative exercise" having practiced all of the formal steps in the process (recognizing problems, writing proposals, carrying out a project, reporting a project in several ways) multiple times in previous geology courses;
• Students graduating from Carleton as geology majors should learn a variety of geologically specific skills, preferably practicing these skills in more than one course;
• Geology graduates also should develop general communication, analysis and quantitative skills in geology classes.

We devised the matrix to help us assess where in the geology curriculum students were gaining skills and where there were major skills gaps.

The matrix is in the form of a simple spreadsheet, with skills in rows and courses (or other experiences) in columns. A letter (a, m, s, r) indicates whether the skill is practiced in all versions of a course, in most, in some or rarely. In the first version of the matrix, main (first order) skills were: General Skills, Computer Skills, Field Skills, Lab Skills and Interpretive Skills. Each category is broken down into specific skills, totaling about 75. The illustration has the first-order skills of the most recent version of the matrix.

Course No:	110	120	210	220	230
Course Title:	Intro	IntEn	Geomorph	Tect	Paleo
First-order skills:
INTERPRETIVE/CRITICAL EVAL.
DOCUMENTATION/COMMUNICATION
QUANTITATION
DATA COLLECTION
EXPERIMENTATION/SIMULATION
INFORMATION LITERACY

Developing the matrix helped us learn about each other's courses and the diversity of teaching styles represented within the faculty. It relieved each faculty member from feeling that every skill needed to be covered in every class. Individual faculty have generated skills lists for specific courses. The skills matrix has contributed to student satisfaction with the major and especially with their feelings of being prepared for their senior integrative exercise.