A PLANETARY GEOLOGY UPWARD BOUND COURSE: WHAT WORKED, WHAT NEEDED WORK, WHAT SURPRISED US, AND WHAT WE DID ABOUT IT

We developed a course in planetary geology for high school students where our primary goals are to help students learn how to learn and encourage them to develop an interest in STEM fields. Our emphasis in this course is on active learning, each lesson is organized around a hands-on laboratory experiment. The course was offered at two of Hawaii’s Upward Bound Programs for the past two summers, 2008 and 2009. Students enrolled in these programs are predominantly low income, from families in which neither parent holds a bachelor’s degree, and are of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander heritage.

We begin the course by giving the students a learning questionnaire so we can assess what learning styles work for each student. Both classes for the past two years were dominated by students that need to receive the same information in multiple formats, and multiple times before being able to comprehend the material. What provided the best results was to have the students work with the subject kinesthetically with the hands-on projects and supplement it with short PowerPoint presentations using Iclickers. Despite the fact that we kept the PowerPoint presentations short, 10 – 20 minutes, we found the students had trouble paying attention. Using the Iclickers excited and revitalized the students and provided instantaneous feedback. Immediately we could see if the students were paying attention and if they understood the material. Daily quizzes also proved to be beneficial. Types of questions that the majority of the class got incorrect were repeated on subsequent quizzes. This helped to show the students not only that they needed to do more than simply memorize information, but also demonstrated the level of understanding they needed to have. It was also helpful to do as much of the work in the classroom as possible as many homework assignments were incorrect, incomplete or not returned.

Three surprising things we learned from the first time we taught this class was that the students did not know the metric system, they had a lot of trouble graphing data by hand, and they did not know how to work together in groups. This year we spent significant time simply working on these concepts before integrating them into their hands-on activities. Incorporating these concepts in a spiral style produced an improved comprehension compared with the previous class.