EXAMINING THE IMPACT OF THE USE OF INTEGRATE TEACHING MATERIALS ON STUDENT PERFORMANCE ON A GEOSCIENCE LITERACY EXAM

A primary goal of the InTeGrate project, an NSF-funded STEM Talent Expansion Program (STEP), is to create student-centered teaching curricula that will improve the geoscience literacy of undergraduate students by teaching geosciences in the context of societal issues. To test the efficacy of these teaching materials, eight faculty members from a variety of post-secondary institutions were recruited to incorporate 18 instructional units of InTeGrate teaching materials into their courses. Instructors had autonomy to select their units from six InTeGrate modules on a range of topics (mineral resources, climate change, earthquakes and volcanoes, freshwater resources, soils, and natural hazards) featuring a total of 36 units. The instructors incorporated the materials into a variety of introductory classes such as Earth Science, Environmental Science, or Physical Geology. The project was conducted over three semesters, and the instructors collected data on student attitudes and learning. Learning assessments included a 16-question version of the Geoscience Literacy Exam (GLE), two short essay questions, and various summative assessments embedded within the teaching units. The Fall 2015 semester of the project served as a control, with the instructors collecting data while teaching the courses with their traditional teaching materials and practices. The 18 units of InTeGrate material were employed in both the Spring 2016 pilot semester and Fall 2016 treatment semester. The work presented here focuses on results from the 16 question GLE multiple choice assessment that students took pre- and post-course during each semester of the project. While students improved only modestly on the 16 question GLE during each semester, gains were the highest for students in the treatment semester where instructors were using the InTeGrate materials for the second time. We will discuss relationships between performance on the GLE and demographic factors, course factors (class size, class type, etc.), and attitudinal factors.