The Utility of Knowledge Surveys in a Culture of Overwork: Design of Introductory Courses That Meet Institutional Educational and Assessment Requirements

Given crowded curricula, encyclopedic textbooks, and increasing teaching loads, knowledge surveys offer a superb organizational instrument that saves faculty time by allowing instructors to design and deliver courses in which students can focus on achieving deep learning of material of greatest importance. The ability to scrutinize a course in detail before enactment permits an instructor to design interactive exercises ahead of time and match these with students' needs and the material to be learned. Without such lead-time, faculty with heavy workloads may defer to lecture simply because lecture preparation is quicker and requires less creativity than design of interactive exercises.

Specialists are not sole arbiters in deciding "What should students learn in our classrooms?" A broader constituency of scholars decides an institution's general or liberal education goal requirements. Pertinent to geology is the fact that in some form these convey a science literacy goal for graduates to achieve deep learning about how we understand and explain the physical world through testable knowledge. That decision accounts for the vast majority of students in our geology courses, so it confers special responsibility on instructors to deliver learning that achieves published institutional outcomes. Today, accreditation agencies scrutinize to see whether published learning outcomes are met, and it is in schools' interests to ensure that they are. Geoscience may be in the best position of any discipline to confer science literacy. It offers authentic experiences and case illustrations in both the classic "scientific method" of replicable experiments and the method of multiple working hypotheses, which geologists first developed and articulated. Knowledge surveys can help us more effectively design, produce, and assess the deep learning we want and that required from our institutions.