CASE-BASED EDUCATION AND HIGHER ORDER THINKING IN INTRODUCTORY GEOLOGY CLASSES

Over the past several decades, university physics, biology and business departments nationwide have made successful use of case-based education to improve both students' understanding of fundamental concepts and their ability to apply these concepts. A case-based approach seems particularly appropriate in an introductory geology course, where many students come into the classroom having already been interested by some particular park, mountain, or natural disaster. I have incorporated case-based learning into my introductory geology curriculum for 3 years now. Rather than building up through a sequence of lectures from first principals to broader applications, the class now begins with specific geological locales (including Mt. Everest, the Great Salt Lake, and the East African Rift Valley) and through exploration of those examples allows students to interpret the basic principles of geology. Comparison of assessment data from the years in which I have used this new curriculum with the previous few years show that students' ability to recall specific information from the lectures for quizzes and exams has remained unchanged. Interestingly, however, students have shown significant improvement on questions that test their ability to apply knowledge –whether through classification or explanation of geologic processes. I attribute the small, but statistically significant, decrease in students' ability to answer questions that call for precise definitions to the fact that the change from traditional to case-based learning was necessarily accompanied by the loss of an accompanying textbook for the course.