DIFFERENCES IN STUDENT SENSE MAKING IN A LECTURE-ONLY VERSUS LECTURE AND LABORATORY SETTING USING SCAFFOLDED INTERVIEWS, MULTIMODAL SETTING AND TABLET PC INTERFACE

We were interested in student thinking and reasoning as a result of their experience in an active learning lecture-only versus students who were enrolled in both the lecture and laboratory portion of the same course. The active learning environment included dynamic interactive lectures, clickers used to assess student formative understanding of geological concepts, and deliberate small group discussion and response throughout the lecture. The laboratory settings incorporated hands-on minds-on activities, opportunities to interact with dynamic geoscience models, encouragement of small group discussion and individual and group reports and field-based assignments.

A convenient sample of eleven freshman students was recruited from a bi-weekly Physical Geology class. Of the eleven students four (1 male and 3 females) were enrolled in the lecture-only section while seven (4 male and 3 female) were enrolled in the lecture and laboratory section. Student verbal and gestural responses were videotaped while their graphic representations were captured on a screen recorder using a tablet PC. A scaffolded interview guide was administered with multimodal responses aggregated and analyzed using a multimodal discourse analysis framework. In total nine questions were administered, four questions were chosen to garner explicit responses based on the lecture-only versus lecture and laboratory attendance. The thematic questions centered around the relationship between earthquakes and faults, identifying different fault types using a modeling trace-over technique, explaining the cultural versus geological implications of earthquakes and a re-representation of processes associated with ocean ridges and trenches.

Differences in student responses varied based on familiarity with the geological concept, responses were framed based on specific experiences in the lecture-only versus lecture and laboratory setting. Students selectively used a gesture to emphasize their verbal or graphic representation. Geoscience reasoning is a spatial, abstract and tactile science requiring students to communicate their understanding in a variety of modes. The lecture and laboratory setting offer opportunities to experience the multi-dimensionality of the geosciences.