USING GEOLOGY-BASED PROBLEMS TO IMPROVE STUDENTS' QUANTITATIVE SKILLS

During my teaching of a non-majors introductory geology course for more than 10 years, I have been somewhat dismayed at the lack of quantitative skills of many of the students. During spring semester, 2002, I attempted to improve some of those skills by having the students work in groups to complete five in-class quantitative projects, and a sixth, stratigraphy/sedimentation project.

Results of a survey the first day of class showed that most of the students had at least two years of high school mathematics, through algebra. During the first week of class, the students took an on-line quiz that covered items such as finding the area of a rectangle or the volume of a box or determining the gradient of a stream. After the first week, the quiz was no longer available to the students. Five in-class projects then addressed the same types of problems: the volume of ash erupted from Mt. St. Helens, rate of Pacific plate movement, rate of chemical weathering, location of earthquake epicenters, and sea level rise if the Antarctic ice caps were to melt. Finally, students took a second quiz at the end of the semester that contained all the questions from the first quiz plus several additional questions. A Student's-t test showed that the second quiz average grade was significantly higher than the first quiz average grade at an alpha of 1.6%. My conclusion is that having quantitative in-class projects did help students improve their quantitative skills.