ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IN A SEDIMENTOLOGY AND STRATIGRAPHY COURSE

I have developed a sedimentology and stratigraphy course that is, in effect, based entirely on the precepts of project-based learning. After struggling with the ‘ideal content’ of this course for over three years, trying to decide ‘what I should cover,’ I decided to focus on what students should be able to do at the end of the course. This naturally led to three major projects that—-in concert with the over-arching goal outlined below-—effectively dictated the content I should cover. The course has one, well-defined, over-arching goal: after the course, students should be able to interpret the depositional environment(s) of a sedimentary sequence in the field, from measured sections, or other representations of the rocks, and hypothesize about the relative roles of sediment supply, base level, or subsidence in generating this sedimentary sequence. The course was not broken down into 'labs' versus 'lectures', but was instead more of continuous discussion section. The course made extensive use of field trips, experiments, and digital data. I examined the effectiveness of this new course structure using pre- and post-course student self-assessments, a student portfolio, and a final exam designed to test whether students were able to achieve the outcomes outlined in the over-arching goal of the course. In general, (1) student satisfaction was very high, (2) self-assessments, portfolios and the final exam indicated considerable in-depth learning, (3) student engagement in the course was extremely high, (4) I lectured for a total of about one-hour in the semester-long course, and (5) students used the textbook more than I have ever experienced and I never assigned a single reading.