INTERACTIVE ACTIVITIES THAT DEVELOP STUDENTS' PROBLEM-SOLVING, QUANTITATIVE, AND VERBAL SKILLS IN LARGE GEOSCIENCE CLASSES

To actively engage students in large geology classes, we break up lectures frequently with interactive learning experiences. These experiences give students practice in solving geologic problems and develop their verbal and quantitative skills. They have been used effectively in entry-level courses (100-180 students) and environmental geology (50-60 students). The activities are intended to introduce a topic, provide a specific example from which a general case can be illustrated, and/or require students to apply what they have learned in new situations. The in-class time commitment ranges from a few minutes to the entire class period. Activities using real data, examples, and issues are particularly effective. Benefits of these activities include giving immediate feedback to students on what they have done, providing practice in solving the types of problems students will encounter in problem sets and exams, helping students stay focused on the subject, and providing opportunities for them to talk about geology. Examples include demonstrations of stress-strain relationships, slope stability predictions followed by the mathematical explanation, exercises in estimation and conversion (e.g., stream discharge, size of drainage basin, rate of shoreline migration). In some cases, students turn in their work as part of the course grade. For one longer activity, students in small groups consider three possible nuclear waste-disposal sites and identify the best and the worst site, giving their reasons. This is followed by a whole class discussion. The smaller size of the environmental geology course enables a greater emphasis on discussion and consensus-building skills. For topics such as earthquake prediction and global warming, the class is divided into several groups and students in each group discuss the issue from an assigned perspective. Students in each group attempt to construct the strongest argument from the information available for that perspective, and then present their case during a class discussion. In preparation for the discussions, students complete an assignment such as plotting historical earthquake data to predict the next earthquake or completing web searches to obtain data to support their assigned position on global warming.