INTRODUCING ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN TO GEOLOGIC FIELDWORK – FROM FORMULATING THE HYPOTHESIS TO ANALYZING THE DATA

The third grade curriculum in New Jersey sees children learning many new skills in science and math, including the scientific method, the rock cycle, graphing and data analysis. Often, these are taught in isolation, albeit with good small scale exercises to improve comprehension in each. This new skill set, combined with the proximity of the South Mountain Reservation, provided the opportunity to develop a guided field exercise that resulted in the students from South Mountain Elementary School in South Orange, NJ conducting their own experiment and analyzing the data. The South Mountain Reservation is home to large outcrops of Jurassic basaltic lava flows, associated with the rifting of Pangea and the formation of the Newark Basin. The students were introduced to images of the East African Rift Valley and Icelandic fissure eruptions to set the scene, and then learned about the columnar structures that form as lava flows cool. They were then told that the basalt outcrops that they would be visiting had similar structures, and they were encouraged to formulate a hypothesis about the number of sides these columns would have, and to suggest how we might test that hypothesis. On visiting the reservation, the students were divided into groups and each had an area within which they counted the sides of all the columns. Students used counters to mark which had been counted, so that none were missed or counted twice. On their return to the classroom, the students plotted a bar chart of the data from their individual group, and as a class they compared the results from each group. Although most came up with the same answer, some were different. This allowed the students to understand that a small data set is not always accurate. Then the results were compiled for the whole class (for each of 5 classes) at which point all data sets reached the consensus that the most common number of sides for a column was 4 – not 6 as predicted by most of the students because that was what they saw in the example from the Giant’s Causeway. Although there is no data to support an improvement in formal test scores for these children, they were enthusiastic about using math skills for something “real” and enjoyed making the discovery that their hypothesis was in need of modification.