A NEW TECHNIQUE FOR VISUALIZING UNDERGRADUATE GEOSCIENCE STUDENT INVOLVEMENT

Student involvement is often tied to persistence in an academic field of study. Astin’s Theory of Involvement (1984) describes how inputs (e.g., previous experiences) and environment (e.g., college experiences and influences) lead to outcomes related to a student’s undergraduate career. This theory is combined with qualitative interview data coding and a visualization technique to allow researchers to plot geoscience involvement and gain a better picture of an individual's involvement over the course of their undergraduate education.

Using the critical incident technique, experiences in the geosciences were identified and coded in student interviews related to a field experience. These experiences were then scored on a scale of 1 (lowest involvement) to 4 (highest involvement) based on intensity and duration of the experience. These critical incidents were subsequently plotted graphically allowing for visualization of periods of relative high, medium, and low involvement through time.

Astin’s Theory of Involvement (1984) has five assumptions: 1) involvement requires both psychosocial and physical energy, 2) involvement is continuous, 3) involvement may have qualitative and/or quantitative aspects, 4) students’ benefit from involvement is directly proportional to their extent of involvement, and 5) academic performance is correlated with student involvement. The plotting of these students' involvement demonstrates the first four assumptions of the theory; future work will include course grades to demonstrate the fifth assumption. This coding and visualization technique can likely be expanded to include other types of involvement and past experiences and adapted to different contexts. Further application of this process to student interviews could also lead to the identification of involvement patterns that result in increased geoscience persistence, with the potential to better understand the degree of influence student involvement might have on student persistence.