THE FALLACY OF EASY COURSES

Many students at UW Whitewater enroll in the introductory geology course because they want to take an “easy” science course to fulfill their general education lab science requirements. This course has no prerequisites. For many students this course is their first (if not the only) science course since middle school, and this requires basic concepts in science and math be covered at the beginning of the course before discussion of geological concepts can begin. Student evaluation comments over the last six academic years, however, indicate that even though students found this course to be relatively easy, they claim to have learned much more in this course than they expect to learn in science courses, especially those in biology and chemistry which they consider to be more “difficult.” Factors cited by students to have helped them learn include one-on-one interaction with the instructor, having upper level undergraduate teaching assistants helping them during the lab sessions, the fact that each test is repeated twice, and that they have access to all the test questions on-line before each test. This presentation will focus on strategies I use to recruit and train my undergraduate teaching assistants, the format of the labs and how the tests are designed and conducted. Such strategies can potentially be incorporated in any large enrollment introductory course to boost student achievement without lowering course standards.