A TREE OR A ROOT? A SUCCESSFUL INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE CURRICULA MODEL AT HIGHLINE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Highline Community College is a typical suburban community college near Seattle, WA with a geoscience program that focuses on transferring non-geoscience majors satisfying a general education requirement. Ten years ago we began a revamping of our curricula from a tree model – where most students take Geology 101 and then some continue to a variety of other sophomore-level classes to a root model - having many introductory-level courses that feed few sophomore-level courses.

Partially as a result of this change enrollments in geology have doubled while they have remained mostly flat or declined in other science courses the same population. Furthermore, we have more students taking multiple geoscience classes, which benefits student learning. As an example, we divided the traditional introductory geoscience course into two courses – a surficial processes course and a plate-tectonics course with rock and mineral identification. Neither has a prerequisite. We use the same textbook for both classes, providing an incentive for students to take both classes. We also divided a traditional environmental geology course into separate resources and hazards classes.

Before we fully divided the introductory level courses, about 11% of students took more than one geology class. Afterwards, almost 18% took two or more classes, generating nearly a third of our enrollments. Furthermore, geology faculty reported that having several students in a class that had had a previous geology class improved classroom demeanor and facilitated group work since these students made natural leaders. As was expected, students who took more than one geology class typically performed above average in both their first and second course. Interestingly, we have not seen an increase in numbers of declared majors at Highline.