A DUAL APPROACH TO IMPROVE STRATIGRAPHY TEACHING: ENHACING STUDENTS' COGNITIVE APTITUDES, AND EXTENSIVE USE OF MULTIMEDIA MATERIAL

All countries make continuous efforts to make teaching/learning more effective at all levels, which has lead to a rigorous evaluation of methods, and to propose pedagogic strategies/models that emphasize the development of students’ cognitive aptitudes. In high-income countries with considerable human resources and appropriate educational infrastructure, it has been possible to successfully implement such models; this is not so in the low-income ones.

The teaching/learning of Stratigraphy in Mexico falls within this situation, posing the additional problems that it is regarded as a somewhat outmoded, little interesting subject, and that it will be thought to students with under-developed cognitive aptitudes. The challenge then is to improve such aptitudes, to show that Stratigraphy is a thought-provoking, integrative subject, central to Geology, because it integrates very diverse information into a coherent history, which forms the spring board for further academic and/or applied research, and to do it utilizing rather modest resources.

In an attempt to meet this challenge, we are engaged in a project entitled “Making of didactic multimedia material for a Stratigraphy graduate course using the collaborative pedagogic approach,” at the University of Mexico. In short the project aims at providing multimedia support material for enhancing the teaching of this basic subject, within a collaborative pedagogic atmosphere, that is, stimulating a close cooperation not only between the teacher and the students, but also among the students, privileging the development of cognitive aptitudes that eventually will allow them “to learn to how learn,” a fundamental tool not only in academia but anywhere, because you learn not only to keep abreast with your specialty’s state of the art [whence the learn how to learn], but also to apply your cognitive capabilities to solve problems (by individual or team work).

The project emphasizes Stratigraphy’s central role in Geology, showing how cognitive aptitudes such as abstraction ability (distinguishing the basic from the accessory), relating diverse, seemingly unrelated data, organizing them into coherent schemes following the logic of facts or assumptions, evaluating the congruence between data and conclusions based on them, etc., is needed to learn and practice it.