EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF INTEREST AND LEARNING IN INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE CLASSES

The affective domain involves attitudes, feelings and emotions that may hinder or promote learning. We examined the relationship between interest and student learning in large, introductory Earth Science classes populated mainly by freshmen (73%) who had not declared a major. Data was drawn from self-reports included in more than 200 learning logs completed early in the class. Students were asked to consider two previous classes, one that resulted in a lot of new learning, and one where they learned little. When asked “Why did you think you learned a lot in one class and relatively little in the other? Approximately half of the students cited “interest” as a key factor in determining how much they learned. Interest was the most common answer. Students reported that the role of the instructor and the in-class activities also contributed to how much they learned.

In an effort to explore the role of interest more fully, we examined student responses to learning log entries that focused on the relationship between student interest in a topic and their reports of their conceptual understanding of that topic. The students were evaluated on two fundamental topics they had learned in class, the Solar System and Plate Tectonics. Students found Earth-sun relations to be most interesting topic in the Solar System lecture and various plate tectonic processes to be the most interesting concepts in the Plate Tectonics chapter. Student answers revealed the concepts that they struggled most to understand were often closely related to the concepts that they identified as the most interesting in the lesson. For example, in the chapter on Plate Tectonics, a student identified the presence of oceanic ridges and trenches as the most interesting concept and the concept of why some areas have trenches while others do not as difficult to understand. Having identified areas of student interest, we can use these concepts as starting points to help address misconceptions about related concepts.