PUSHING THE ENVELOPE: INCORPORATING FIELD EXPERIENCES ACROSS MULTIPLE LABS, COURSES, AND YEARS

Integrating field and laboratory activities into the classroom provide students with motivation to learn field and laboratory methods and a relevant context in which to apply them. When such activities can be turned into authentic research experiences the students feel more invested in the lab, which translates to greater engagement and diligence for the work than one-off lab experiences provide. Leveraging this experience over multiple lab periods and multiple lab sections within a course presents additional opportunities and challenges for student learning. Coordination among the labs and between lab and lecture can be demanding, but the pay off is a richer, broader dataset to which all students can contribute. Moreover, extending the project theme over multiple years and revisiting the theme in upper-level courses provides opportunities for students to be involved in work that extends beyond their particular lab section, and in the case of majors, it is work that they will revisit in other courses. This further increases student involvement, can lead to independent study projects, and may successfully contribute to the instructor’s research program. However, consistency in data acquisition and quality control/assurance must be carefully considered as each new round of data is collected and analyzed. A case study of a series of labs that encompassed two courses over several years is used to illustrate the merits and pitfalls of this approach.