TEACHING THE RELEVANCE OF GEOLOGY TO NON-SCIENCE UNDERGRADUATES THROUGH THE USE OF MAJOR-SPECIFIC PROJECTS: PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Within a liberal arts college environment, general education provides knowledge and experiences outside students' major fields. Such "core" coursework, however, is oftentimes met with disdain by their intended beneficiaries. Consequently, students frequently enter core geology courses with preconceived notions and a sense the information learned will be of little or no value. Many of the same students also frequently enter the classroom with little prior science background and this, combined with a negative attitude, leads to low scores and much frustration on the part of both the students and the professor.

Academic majors within these courses are varied and include, among others, business and management, political science, elementary education, public relations and journalism, and computer science. For each of these, a specific assignment option was created to combat student misconceptions that geology holds no relevance. For example, a business major could pose as a stock analyst for a Wall Street brokerage firm and write a stock evaluation on a fictitious company comprised of two divisions; a division that locates and extracts geologic resources for sale and a division that develops predictions of geologic hazards for insurance companies. The student must assess the future profitability of each division and the company as a whole based upon the student's newly acquired understanding of how geologists go about each task, how successful they are and, most importantly, why they are or are not successful.

Student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and the assignments are typically tackled with noticeably more positive attitudes than more traditional means of evaluation with the result that subject matter comprehension and grades have improved substantially. An unintended positive outcome is that students' see not only that geology is relevant to their own major, but to the majors of other students in the class as well. Interestingly, some students elect to complete an assignment based on a major different from their own even though one related to their major is available. It is unclear at this point if such students perceive the chosen assignment as being easier than the one designed for their major or if they will in time discover they have stronger interests in areas different from their current major.