MULTI-YEAR, LONG-TERM FIELD PROJECTS AS A TEACHING TOOL IN GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION

Although many geoscience educators have field exercises that are repeated annually with new groups of students, most require the students to completely regenerate a new set of data each year without consideration of the data collected in prior years. Our experience with a project that has been repeated on a near-annual basis for the past 19 years, is that when data from the initial year of the project are made available to students, both interest and enthusiasm are often amplified. Specifically, in an exercise to illustrate lateral migration of a meandering stream, each year students in a geology class at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls survey a topographic profile of the stream across two sections using a level, tape, and stadia rod. Each group is given copies of the profiles that were surveyed the first year and are asked to use these as a base for plotting their newly obtained data. When each year's results are superimposed on the original data the results are striking; the meander bend has migrated almost 3 meters (9.8 ft) during the past 19 years. Likewise, if also given a copy of the profile data from the preceding year, students can determine the amount of cut-bank erosion that has occurred during the past year and attempt to relate this to precipitation records for this area. We believe that if this were simply a "techniques" lab exercise to familiarize students with the basics for surveying a topographic profile, the interest among students would be considerably lower than it is when previous survey data are made available. In addition, because future classes will utilize the students' data, students feel a greater responsibility to collect high quality data.