TEACHING STRATIGRAPHY BY POGIL (PROCESS-ORIENTED GUIDED INQUIRY LEARNING): SUCCESSES AND CHALLENGES

Process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) is a teaching and learning technique originally developed by chemistry educators to improve critical thinking and problem solving in science courses. In POGIL, the instructor acts as a facilitator for students who explore processes that underlie natural phenomena. Students construct an understanding by conducting experiments, making observations, and articulating explanations of phenomena. This method of teaching and learning is rather similar to the ways in which field trips are generally conducted in geology, but it is not typically practiced in the geology classroom.

In the Stratigraphy and Geochronology course at UWG, students struggle with terminology and typically articulate understanding poorly. In end-of-term evaluations, they report that lecture and lab were not well articulated, and that the terminology was difficult to understand, despite rating the course and instructor fairly highly. During Fall 2006, I reorganized this course to focus on the fundamental processes that underlie stratigraphy and conducted the course by guided inquiry, rather than by the traditional lecture-lab format. Students spent class time doing hands-on work that guided them through constructing explanations of facies change, stratigraphic patterns, and sequence architecture, viewed through the lens of fundamental physical processes. Students developed an understanding of process first, and learned terminology only after the conceptual framework had been mastered.

This “lectureless” approach resulted in greater understanding of stratigraphic concepts and improved performance on examinations. However, students displayed decreased confidence in their mastery of material and performed somewhat more poorly on quantitative elements (e.g., radiometric dating). From an instructor's perspective, guided inquiry requires a high degree of flexibility, and is labor-intensive compared to a traditional lecture format. Students, though, were more engaged in the course material than in previous years, attended class more regularly, and participated in hypothesis construction on the required two-day field trip. Overall, POGIL instruction represents an effective approach to teaching stratigraphy, and the benefits outweigh the challenges.