USING PRIMARY LITERATURE AND THE CREATE MODEL TO ENHANCE UNDERGRADUATE LEARNING IN MINERALOGY, A GATEWAY COURSE TO THE MAJOR

At Mason, students in Mineralogy are in their first upper-level course in their major. They do not have the knowledge base or lexicon to understand peer-reviewed journal articles. Using ideas and skills from the C.R.E.A.T.E. (Consider, Read, Elucidate the hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, and Think of the next Experiment) model and workshop of Hoskins and Kenyon, I enable the class to deconstruct and then rebuild the MSA paper on Mineral Evolution (Hazen et al., 2008). At the end of the semester, Hazen attends a class session and discusses not only the topic with the students, but also his ideas on science, why he does science, how he became interested in these topics, and the creativity of scientific thinking. It is a fun, lively, interactive session.

Students do not read or even see the complete paper until the end of the semester. I give them small parts to consider at a time. Project 1 is to map the increasing numbers of minerals over time, relating it to other historical geology events. Students create excel sheets, and hand-drawn charts, graphs, and spirals, all showing the data, all different and all correct. We discuss, analyze and define the different meteorites, and they create “cartoons” of the creation of the Earth using the minerals available at that time. The final project (with the whole paper) is a short discussion of their favorite topic and questions for Dr. Hazen.

Understanding of the concepts is greatly enhanced from my previous method of giving the students the paper to read, and then asking Hazen to present. Skills attained are transferable to other courses where students have to read and understand peer-reviewed literature.