RECONSTRUCTING THE PALEOGEOGRAPHY OF A MOCK WORLD: A PROGRESSIVE LAB SERIES DESIGNED TO ENGAGE GEOLOGY 101 STUDENTS

At Augustana College, Physical Geology (101) fulfills a general education requirement and is often dominated by non-science majors. Given this demographic, we have three major course goals: 1) to ensure future geology majors learn and apply fundamental geologic principles, 2) to engage all students regardless of geologic background or interest, and 3) to encourage all students to think critically and apply high-order synthesis and evaluation skills. Recently, the geology faculty at Augustana transitioned from traditional identification-style introductory labs to a fully integrated set of progressive “mock world” labs that we refer to collectively as “Augietania” (inspired by Zaprowski and Clyde (1999) Playing Wegener in a Mock World... J Geosci Ed, 47:336-340).

Augietania refers to a mock world whose properties closely parallel Earth’s. During the initial lab, students are provided with the basic physiography of the planet. As the labs progress, students are tasked with identifying rocks and fossils using samples “collected” from the planet and dating them using radiometric techniques; they perform an assessment of seismic activity and overlay this information onto bathymetric profiles; they examine paleomagnetic “cores” to determine paleolatitude for samples from multiple time intervals; and finally, they synthesize all known information to reconstruct the paleogeography through sixteen time intervals.

We have implemented Augietania in three ways: as review and synthesis labs for the second half of 10-week terms, as integrated labs throughout entire semester-long courses, and as an intense first-week (10 labs) of a 3-week-long January-term course. Although it is too soon to quantitatively assess the benefits of Augietania compared to traditional lab methods, we suggest that – at a minimum – students have demonstrated the ability to perform high-level thinking in all three delivery modes. Success in achieving our goals is evidenced by the quality of their final reconstructions, written interpretations, and assertions that the iterative nature of these low stress, collaborative, tiled activities has been greatly beneficial to their learning process. We hope that by sharing these materials, other instructors may also explore the benefits of mock world lab activities.