USING CLASS PARTICIPANTS TO FACILITATE THE LEARNING AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF ALL STUDENTS: LESSONS FROM AN INTRODUCTORY GEOLOGY COURSE

The classic scheme of intellectual development posed by Perry (1970) and referenced by others such as Kegan (1998) and Baxter-Magolda (2001), demonstrates that college students go through a series of cognitive, affective, and moral stages of development through the college years. It is important for educators to understand these developmental levels in order to construct appropriate scaffolding for the learning process. Pedagogical practices can assist students in their transitions to higher-order intellectual skills and maturity, provided such experiences are given to students at an appropriate time in their college careers. One of the challenges of large introductory geology courses is that they often serve campus-wide distribution requirements and include students at many different developmental levels. It can be difficult to construct assignments and activities that facilitate deep learning when the audience can be in widely varied states of cognitive development. In such cases, it can be helpful to use senior students to peer teach or model effective learning strategies to other class participants. Such exercises not only assist more junior students in their development, they also strengthen and provide confidence to students already at more sophisticated developmental levels. For example, exercises related to topics that are currently controversial, such as global warming, and topics that have been historically controversial, like the age of the Earth, can help younger students develop a more complex way of thinking about science. More advanced students can model an understanding of the constructivist nature of scientific knowledge to these students while simultaneously working on using evidence to commit to a viewpoint. This can provide all students with advances in their own development as well as a deeper understanding of how science evolves with the accumulation of knowledge.