GEOLOGIC PROBLEM SOLVING IN THE FIELD: INSIGHTS FROM ANALYSIS OF GPS TRACKS AT VARIABLE TEMPORAL SCALES

Field instruction is an essential component of undergraduate geoscience majors’ education, and despite its central importance, there exists relatively little educational research exploring how students learn to solve problems in geological fieldwork. This study adds to work presented in previous studies by our group using GPS tracking of students engaged in independent field examinations. We have examined four students from our previous studies working in a new field area. We also applied a new variant of our polygon coding approaches for analyzing student navigation tracks to gauge the sensitivity of our method to the time scale of analysis. Using position data collected at 1-minute intervals from GPS units we generated 5-minute and 15-minute sequential polygons, which were coded for navigational patterns. Analysis reveals that the polygon sequences generated from the analysis are similar at both time scales, but impart different insights into effective geologic problem solving in the field. The finer scale coding reveals more precise movements related primarily to identification of key features and lithologies, whereas the large-scale coding is useful for showing longer-range planning in problem solving, as the large-scale movements average out small-scale investigatory moves. Our results also suggest that there is an optimum amount of relocation and backtracking in detailed and difficult field areas. Too much retracing indicates confusion, as found in our earlier study, but too little reoccupation of key areas appears to indicate a failure to recognize important features. A subsequent study over the past two summers at a field camp in Montana has provided extensive data on a diverse group of students working in a geologically varied, but well constrained area. In conjunction with the GPS tracks, ancillary data was collected to help provide further insight to students’ cognitive processes while mapping, and outside factors that may affect these processes. New methods are being developed in conjunction with this study to highlight the importance of students’ spatial relationship with key geologic markers and this relationship’s impact on problem solving success. Our study offers additional refinement of developing instructional tools in gauging student skills in geologic field problem solving offered by GPS tracking.