WARMING UP THE BRAIN: EVOKING STUDENT INTEREST WHILE EVALUATING BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE IN INTRODUCTORY PHYSICAL GEOLOGY COURSES

Warm-ups are brief interactive activities performed at the beginning of a topic to evoke student interest and identify student misconceptions. They can be used to set a tone for the upcoming lessons, promote peer interactions and encourage metacognition. Here we present several examples of warm-up exercises including pre-quizzes, evocatives, wordsplash, whips, list/group/label, opinionaire and free association that can be incorporated into introductory physical geology courses.

Warm up exercises can be implemented with different intentions. The course warm up focuses on improving student attitude and visualize the value of the subject matter for the course. Unit warm-ups stimulate student interest and metacognition while allowing faculty to identify misconceptions to correct and preconceptions to build on. Daily warm ups are used to assess the comprehension of previous course lecture material.

Warm up activities were conducted in both online and face to face introductory physical geology courses at a two-year college in metro-Atlanta. While keeping time of day, format and instructor consistent, course sections implementing warm-up activities were compared to those without. Initial observations on student performance between groups will be discussed.