EVALUATING THE EDUCATIONAL IMPACTS OF BRINGING RESEARCH INSTRUMENTATION INTO GEOLOGY COURSES VIA REMOTE ACCESS TECHNOLOGIES

"Project-based" learning approaches, employing research instrumentation for laboratory and/or structured research activities in science courses, are widely utilized, in part because such evidence as exists indicates positive student and faculty impressions of these activities. Interestingly, little information related to the student learning benefits of classroom research instrumentation has thus far been reported, aside from reports of the logistical difficulties these approaches can introduce into courses. We are in the midst of an NSF-CCLI funded effort to engage students in instrumental analysis as part of their geoscience coursework through the use of remotely operable electron microprobe and scanning electron microscope facilities at the Florida Center for Analytical Electron Microscopy-FIU. These instruments are employed to support student term projects in a Junior-level mineralogy/petrology course, and an introductory level geoscience/planetary science course.

We are seeking to measure three outcomes of these interventions: 1) Student impressions of the experience and course. We have worked with the USF Center for Research Evaluation, Assessment and Measurement to implement a Likert-scale online instrument to gauge student response. 2) Student interest and engagement in geology, and the specific course content is also examined as part of our student surveys, but also longitudinally, based on student enrollment in Senior-level Geology research courses using the microprobe or SEM. 3) Student Learning. We have approached this via a pretest/post-test method. Along with content-specific questions, we are using a subset test from the Geoscience Concept inventory (Libarkin and Anderson, 2002) to assess changes in student conceptual understanding in the broad content areas of the courses. Thus far student impression results indicate positive student response to both learning instrument use and to the research activities this supports, and pretest/post-test comparisions before and after the intervention suggest possible increases in student content retention. Several students have now followed my GLY 3311C course with research projects, several of which are being presented at this meeting.