FIFTEEN WEEKS OF “LAB”: PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IN A JUNIOR-LEVEL SEDIMENTOLOGY AND STRATIGRAPHY CLASS (Invited Presentation)

The University of Missouri’s undergraduate Sedimentology and Stratigraphy class, Geol 3800, has evolved into a student-centered, project-based learning course. Originally designed as a traditional 4 credit-hour unit, with 3 hours of lecture (faculty-led) and 2 hours of laboratory (TA-led) a week, it later became a 3-credit hour, lecture-only class taught by a faculty member, after the lab was dropped from the course. In spring 2010 the lab was re-instated, and it followed a traditional 3-hour lecture and 2-hour lab (both faculty-led) model for three offerings, spring semesters of 2010, 2011 and 2012. During those three years lab exercises became progressively more involved, and the class started to feel like a really long lab, with increasingly shorter spells of lecture. We were getting somewhere.

By spring 2013 the course had been re-designed into a project-based learning class. While remaining as a 4 credit-hour course, students and faculty instructor now meet for 6 hours a week, 3 hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays. During the 15-week semester students work on 6 different projects, designed to build on each other, and challenge students to higher order thinking. Class projects also require a significant amount of writing, as this class is designed to satisfy a portion of an upper-level Writing Intensive requirement at MU. The projects are mostly centered on data sets of Mesozoic clastic rocks from the Wind River Basin in WY and the Book Cliffs in UT. Students are also introduced to carbonate sedimentology/stratigraphy and thin section petrography during class projects and also during an optional spring break field trip to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Tularosa Basin.

Assessment of student learning is achieved through completion of the class projects, several “progress checks” interspersed through the semester, and a final class exam. Progress checks (PCs) are designed as short exercises that can be completed in under an hour during class time, which require students to apply, rather than “re-write”, material they have learned. The class final exam, which takes 2-3 hours to complete, is similarly “hands-on”, requiring lots of thinking, and very little writing.