IMPACT OF HANDS-ON LEARNING IN INQUIRY-BASED LAB ACTIVITIES IN INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE LABS

Laboratory activities provide opportunities to engage undergraduates in the "hands-on" portion of introductory courses. We used the Teaching Beliefs Inventory (1) to ask 11 teaching assistants (TAs) about teaching and learning in introductory geoscience courses including, "How do your students learn science best?" 61% of TAs interviewed indicated they believed hands-on activities helped their students learn science. This study aims to determine if TAs’ ideas were correct, that hands-on learning correlates with increased student learning. We used TA interview responses to define hands-on as physically interacting with an artifact, (e.g. a rock or mineral), then compared learning in plate tectonics (not hands-on) and minerals (hands-on) lab activities. Learning gains were assessed using multiple choice questions given at the beginning and end of the semester. Interest in the overall lab topic was measured at the end of the lab period. Data was collected from two semesters each of labs in face-to-face (F2F) and online instructional formats. Average learning gains were 14.8% for plate tectonics and 55.7% for minerals, which is consistent with greater learning in labs where students physically handle artifacts (hands-on) We also tested the effect of students learning the two topics in F2F vs. online formats and found that learning gains are higher for F2F minerals labs (with artifacts; 87.3%) than online minerals labs (no artifacts; 39.9%), but learning gains remained similar in each format (14.4% and 15.9%, respectively). The course format also impacts student interest, which was significantly higher for minerals than plate tectonics labs in the F2F format (p<.001), but there was no significant difference between the two labs when taught online. Data suggest that the hands-on format drives student learning more than interest. To test this, ongoing work includes developing a plate tectonics lab that incorporates artifact-driven hands-on activities to measure if student learning gains increase with the revised plate tectonics activity. Our preliminary results suggest that instructors should create labs that include hands-on artifacts whenever possible to increase student learning. (1) Luft & Roehrig, 2007