UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS' CONCEPTIONS OF GEOLOGY: WHAT ARE THEY, AND DO THEY CHANGE?

Students’ understandings and experiences of ‘geology’ as a science are seldom documented, and yet these can provide valuable information which can be used to inform and develop academic curricula. Students embarking on four geoscience-related degree programs at a single UK university were asked to provide written responses to the question “what do you think geology is about or concerned with?” Repeating this survey at three further times throughout the students’ three-year degrees meant that conceptions were captured at the beginning of their first, second, and final years, and at the very end of their undergraduate teaching, thus providing a longitudinal dataset. This dataset was interrogated to a) identify the range of qualitatively distinct conceptions of geology expressed within the cohort; b) explore whether students’ conceptions changed as they progressed through their degree (i.e. from novice to expert); c) investigate whether changes in conceptions could be linked to specific degree pathways. Qualitative analysis revealed six distinct conceptions which could be further categorized according to the broad ontological classification of ‘matter’, ‘process’, and ‘systems’ (Libarkin & Kurdziel, 2006). Quantification of the data revealed that the majority of students expressed process-oriented conceptions, regardless of the stage of their degree. The proportion of students expressing conceptions of geology as ‘matter’ progressively decreased over time, whilst the patterns relating to process- and systems-oriented conceptions were more variable. These findings suggest that, at the scale of an entire cohort, students’ conceptions of geology do change over time. The precise nature of these changes may, however, be influenced by the specific degree program that a student follows, particularly where there is a greater emphasis on the applied aspects of geoscience.