THE CHALLENGE OF NON-EARTH SCIENCE MAJORS IN CLASSROOM STUDENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

The Dickinson College Department of Earth Sciences has a long tradition of student research across the curriculum as preparation for the senior independent research experience. However, as the College becomes more interdisciplinary students majoring in other sciences, e.g. Environmental Studies and non-science majors are entering our required and upper level elective courses. These students often have no previous or different experience with scientific research. Here we discuss the successes and perceived failures of a class research project in our Chemistry of Earth Systems course, a course required for our major but where half of the participants were not Earth Science majors. Lectures included chemical principles and discussion of earth systems allowed an understanding of the chemistry of the topic. The labs provided the tools needed for sample collection, sample preparation, and data acquisition from our analytical instrumentation. The research project attempts to combine the principles with the analytical expertise to answer a geochemical problem. The class make-up necessitated a problem that was relevant to both Earth Science and non-Earth Science majors; in this case to ascertain whether anthropogenic land-use in a local watershed could be documented chemically in “Legacy” sediments originally sequestered behind 19^th century mill dams but now being remobilized. Students were divided into 8 teams of two with each team having an Earth Science major and a non-major. Each team was responsible for analyzing the chemistry (major and trace elements), mineralogy, and organic carbon in a sediment core from one of two sites in the watershed. The successes of the project were that each student found and read a range of papers describing the geologic and environmental aspects of the topic; collected and analyzed a core; wrote introduction, previous work, methods, and data analysis sections of their paper with revision; presented their results to the rest of the class; and wrote final papers on the entire project. Students had difficulty with time and data management to do analyses and synthesize the dataset. The core analyses did show conclusive evidence of anthropogenic input but there was little cognizance of the sources of background chemistry from soils and bedrock versus anthropogenic sources.