CHANGING STUDENT ATTITUDES TOWARDS LEARNING THROUGHOUT THE GEOSCIENCE CURRICULUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, VANCOUVER

Undergraduate geoscience courses at The University of British Columbia are being transformed under the auspices of the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) into courses wherein students are active learners engaged in the classroom, with the goal of increasing student learning. We present initial results and some general conclusions from the first two years of this five year project.

In 2008, two required second year courses (Introduction to Petrology, 75 students; and the classroom part of Introduction to Field Geology, 60 students) were modified from a traditional lecture/laboratory format by introducing explicit course-level and lecture-level learning goals, linking exam questions to those goals, adding pre- and post-course assessments to quantify learning outcomes, and requiring participation in several ways. To allow class time for discussion and exercises, somewhat less material was covered; students were therefore expected to keep up with the reading. Simpler concepts, although important, were not given much time in class. There was some resistance from students to learning more on their own, possibly from being conditioned to learn by passive note-taking in a traditional lecture format. Surveys taken in the middle and at the end of these courses indicate that most students understood and appreciated the goals of the course transformation process, although many preferred a return to a traditional lecture-based format. We continue to modify these courses based on our observations of what did and did not work, taking some (but not all) student comments into account.

In 2009, 40 students from the initial student cohort enrolled in a newly-transformed third year course (Tectonic Evolution of North America) which has the modified second year courses as pre-requisites. From the beginning of the class it has been apparent that the students have accepted and adjusted to taking a more active role in the course. Despite initial resistance, they have become more active learners, and our continuing goal is to have this attitude shift permeate throughout our geoscience courses.