INTERSESSION FIELD TRIPS EXTEND OPPORTUNITIES FOR INTRODUCTORY STUDENTS

Extensive previous work documents the benefits of undergraduate field experiences on geoscience students’ knowledge, skills, and career attitudes/awareness (e.g., Plymate et al., 2005, Petcovic et al., 2013). Field studies at the introductory level have particularly strong potential as a recruitment tool for new geoscience majors, but there are numerous hurdles to instituting these programs: student-centered issues (limited geoscience content knowledge, quantitative and spatial reasoning skills, and knowledge of field techniques); alignment with course, department, and institutional-level curricula; and resource-related barriers (funding, equipment, staffing, etc.) At Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC), a community college in eastern Los Angeles County, the majority of geoscience courses offer single to 5-day field trips as an essential part of the curriculum. Although most students who enroll in our courses are not STEM majors, a unique instructional problem has emerged because those students who take multiple courses in the department face some aspect of the same suite of geologic challenges (and perhaps field sites) on a given field trip. We sought to alleviate this issue by developing a course with an extended field trip to geological sites that are beyond the geographic reach of a regular semester. GEOL29 (Special Topics in Field Geology), an introductory-level course, was piloted in spring 2015 and included 6 on-campus meetings during the traditional spring semester and an 18-day field trip in June-July to Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. The trip duration, sites, and exercises provided opportunities for students to begin developing some of the content, technical, and soft skills necessary for geoscience careers, including geologic mapping, outcrop analysis, use of multiple working hypotheses, ability to work with colleagues on extended projects, obtaining access to remote/limited access geologic sites, and overcoming challenges related to novelty space (see Orion and Hofstein, 1994; Elkins and Elkins, 2007.) We offer examples of student work to investigate the evolution of these skills over the course of the field trip and results from pre- and post-field trip attitude surveys to consider the impact of the extended field experience on geoscience attitudes.