GEOSCIENCE SUCCESS LESSONS: CREATING PSYCHOLOGICALLY WISE INTERVENTIONS FOR INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE STUDENTS TO CHANGE THEIR WORKING HYPOTHESES ON LEARNING

Careers in geoscience are increasing in demand, but the discipline struggles to attract majors. Additionally, women continue to be underrepresented in geoscience. Teaching interventions that address self-regulatory processes for students in introductory geoscience courses could increase student success and interest, with a particular impact on female students. These teaching interventions should 1) address students’ meaning of learning, 2) alter their inaccurate working hypotheses through brief exercises, and 3) attempt to lead to lasting personal change. Teaching interventions that do these three things are called psychologically wise interventions. We developed a psychologically wise intervention to improve female student success in introductory geology classes.

Psychologically wise interventions aim to impact ubiquitous societal problems and are characterized by five principles. We will explain our development of a new affective domain intervention to specifically increase female geoscience students' success that follows the five principles of wise interventions:

1. Alter students’ specific meaning of learning to include affective and self-regulatory skills, and thus promote change in their thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors around learning;
2. Align with an understanding that students’ meaning of learning operates within complex systems;
3. Stimulate students to change their behaviors in regards to affective self-regulatory processes;
4. Are methodologically rigorous; and
5. Are ethically sound.

We will describe barriers, successes, and lessons learned through the process (e.g., the challenge of word usage in two fields with similar terminology for very different intents; female student improvement in affective domain areas related to learning in geology) and provide implications and suggestions for developing psychologically wise affective domain interventions for improving student self-regulatory processes and subsequent success in geoscience.