SELF-EFFICACY AS A LEARNING TOOL IN GENERAL EDUCATION INTRODUCTORY GEOLOGY COURSES

Introductory Historical Geology course at George Mason University is a general education class that serves about 400 students a year and focuses on a general understanding of the evolution of the Earth as a system. Success in this course relies heavily on an understanding of basic concepts that are new to most students, such as deep time, absolute and relative time measurements and the significance of unconformity. To avoid rote memorization of a collection of disconnected facts, self-efficacy exercises utilizing stratigraphic principles are assigned that organizes information for meaningful student cognition. The questions require students to apply concepts directly to very simple cases and to concisely justify their answer. Following their answer, students rate their level of confidence as follows: 1 for being absolutely sure, 2 for being somehow on the right track and 3 for just guessing. Before carrying out this exercise, we inform the students of the value of self-efficacy in successful and meaningful learning. Results of a study carried out in Spring 2009 indicate that the students tend to overestimate their confidence on the answer to the question (i.e. the solution to the problem) but are less confident as to the explanation of their solution process. In anecdotal feedback students recognize this exercise to be a helpful studying aid, more so than other techniques (concept mapping, minute papers, etc…). Findings lead to the conclusion that students have more experience and are more comfortable with the memorization of facts and data rather than reasoning about the application of principles and laws of nature. Additionally the self-efficacy instrument has been found to be useful to the instructor for understanding the depth and level of correctness that the students have achieved in mastering a concept (or the level of misconception related to it).