DATA, INQUIRY, AND SOCIETALLY-ORIENTED CURRICULAR MODULES: COMPARISON OF DESIGN INPUTS AND ACTUAL USE PATTERNS

The NSF-funded Geodesy Tools for Societal Issues (GETSI) project was started to address a lack of undergraduate learning resources about geodesy – a branch of geoscience that studies the Earth’s size, shape, mass distribution, rotation, and variations of these over time. GETSI has developed thirteen ~2-week modules to engage students in geodetic data analysis relevant to societally important topics of natural hazards, water resources, and climate change.

This study compares module design with actual faculty use. The design was grounded in community input and evidence-based practices. At the project outset, two charrettes and a community survey indicated that geoscience faculty: 1) valued all three topics with hazards being highest (95%); 2) were most interested in lab/activities, data sets, and animations (74-84%) and least interested in assessments (42%); 3) strongly preferred modules be divided into “units” for flexible adoption. Following principles of backwards design and other evidence-based practices, GETSI also includes: learning outcomes, robust assessment strategies, active learning strategies, and science grounded in the context of addressing societal challenges -- even though faculty did not strongly value these aspects at the outset.

To study actual use patterns, GETSI conducted “Share Your Experience” surveys. 86% of users were “very likely” to use modules again. The quality rating averaged 9 on a scale of 1-10. The 80 respondents reported on directly reaching 4,969 students, suggesting the actual reach was >>20,000, given that 733 faculty have requested access to private instructor resources (i.e. answer keys). In keeping with initial faculty advice to divide modules into units, almost no users completed an entire module as published. More typically faculty used a subset of the 3-6 units per module and made at least some modifications to what they did use. Faculty perceptions of resource usefulness also matched relative initial interest with 96% of activities/labs being “useful” to “very useful”. Animations, instructor notes, and presentations achieving 89-93%; whereas assessments were only deemed 46% useful. Counter to initial predictions, however, instructors used “societally-focused” units at essentially the same rate (57%) as the more “data-focused” units (60%).