REDESIGNING COLLEGE GEOLOGY TEXTBOOKS BASED ON COGNITIVE AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

For years we have surveyed college geology instructors about their goals in introductory geology courses, which of these goals are most important, and how much class time is spent on each goal. From these surveys, there is a huge disconnect between our goals and what we do in class. The stated goals include having students observe, do critical thinking, and experience inquiry, in addition to learning content and relevance. Most class time, however, is spent delivering content because many students do not learn from a traditional textbook or cannot tell what is important. These issues led us to use cognitive and educational research to design a new vision of a textbook. A key aspect of the design is conveying content with fully annotated figures, rather than large blocks of text. Research indicates that we have two cognitive processing subsystems and that students do not learn as much when they have to reconcile text, figures, and figure captions. An annotated figure approach, modeled after the idea of a concept sketch, helps students envision spatial relations and interactions of different components as a system; it is consistent with the way most instructors already teach. Another guiding principle, cognitive load, implies that new information displaces existing information in working memory unless there is an opportunity to consolidate new knowledge into long-term memory. To ease cognitive load, the book design consists entirely of self-contained two-page spreads, most further subdivided into digestible sections. Each chapter is designed to be a learning cycle, with an opening invitation-to-learn spread followed by topical spreads that introduce and explore processes, concepts, terms, and relevance. The last two spreads in each chapter are an application of the concepts to a real place and an investigation spread that provides students an opportunity to observe, interpret, calculate, and predict – in other words, to do critical thinking and various aspects of scientific inquiry. Class testing with hundreds of students indicates that students greatly prefer a figure-centered approach over a traditional book and think they learn more from such an approach. Our data further suggest that we can rely on the book to teach much of the content, freeing up instructors to design class time more in accordance with our goals.