STUDENT SUCCESS IN EARTH SCIENCE: WHICH LOGICAL THINKING SKILLS ARE IMPORTANT AND WHY?

The Group Assessment of Logical Thinking instrument, that tests six logical operations, was administered to 393 students on the first day of class and near the end of the course. When compared to their peers, about 15% of the students had less developed reasoning skills in three areas - conservation, probability and correlational thinking. Those students earned significantly lower scores on formative and summative assessments than their classmates enrolled in the same inquiry-based Earth Science course for non-majors. Students who lack conservation skills predicted that changing the shape of an object changed its mass. Conservation skills are necessary to grasp concepts and processes related to the earth-sun energy budget, the hydrologic cycle and the rock cycle. Students lacking probability-related reasoning skills were more likely to have trouble in moving beyond basic mathematics to conceptual understanding of underlying principles. These students commonly ask for formulas to solve recurrence interval problems that are conceptual and require no calculations. Students who lacked correlational reasoning skills were unable to connect the various characteristics of plate boundaries (earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain building) to the processes that generate those phenomena. Such skills are also required to understand many other ideas in the geosciences that require higher level thinking (e.g. the carbon cycle, natural climate change, thermohaline circulation). Successful correlational thinkers can logically deduce causal relationships. By the end of the course, lower performing students had improved their conservation skills to the level their successful counterparts had at the beginning of the course. More research is necessary to determine efficient interventions that promote rapid skill development to better improve student success.