METHODS OF ASSESSING AND IMPROVING STUDENT METACOGNITION ON FIELD TRIPS

Our teaching experiences indicate that introductory geoscience students struggle with applying concepts learned in the classroom to field trip sites. In conjunction with the Faculty Inquiry Network (FIN), a group of 18 California community college teams investigating complex problems in basic skills education, we studied how students transfer classroom knowledge to unfamiliar field environments. We collected a variety of data, including video footage of field trips, lesson studies, copies of student work, and interviews with students and faculty, in an attempt to pinpoint the skills and concepts that are most problematic for students and identify the primary hurdles to critical thinking and knowledge transfer in the field.

Our preliminary results indicate that introductory geology students need more models and examples in order to complete field trip tasks and assignments satisfactorily. In addition, we found that repetition is essential to students successfully applying specific concepts and skills on a field trip. We also suspect that using student co-inquirers as videographers may encourage students to give more honest feedback about their cognitive experiences in the field. Finally, collecting video of students in the field provides an opportunity to conduct real-time assessment of student learning after the field trip and captures subtleties about metacognition that would most likely be missed in field notebooks, journals, and in the field. We will present several examples of classroom and field strategies that we are using to enhance self-directed learning, critical thinking, and metacognition in the classroom and in the field.