AN INQUIRY-BASED EARTH AND SPACE SCIENCE LAB COURSE FOR ELEMENTARY EDUCATION MAJORS

Geology/Astronomy 106L is a required two-hour Earth and space science lab developed for elementary education majors and offered each semester since fall 2011. It complements a two-credit online course and covers content aligned with the Iowa Core Curriculum. Concurrent enrollment in lab and course is required, and around 85 students complete them each semester. The three credits of Earth and space science are part of the nine credits of science content courses required for K-6 licensure in Iowa.

The lab curriculum focuses on student engagement and inquiry within a constructivist framework. Content includes geologic time, plate tectonics and Pangaea, earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, rocks and minerals, marine sediments and oceans, water, weather and climate, seasons and lunar phases, and the Solar System. Starting in spring 2018, this sequence closely matches the weekly modules in the online course. Assessment consists of weekly lab reports, three quizzes, and lecture tutorials assigned as homework.

While each lab session has a main theme, most labs consist of a series of short (15-30 min) activities for students to work on in groups of four often involving the jigsaw technique. Previous research has shown that the course and lab have a positive, albeit non-statistically significant, effect on students’ science teaching self-efficacy, and suggest that most of the gain is to be attributed to the lab.

To assess the students’ perception of the level of inquiry of each lab and of their learning, we asked them to complete short paper forms at the end of each lab. The results show a moderate correlation between perceived level of inquiry and perceived level of learning.