THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: COMBINING VIRTUAL AND PHYSICAL FIELD TRIPS TO ENHANCE STUDENT LEARNING

Travel restrictions imposed during Covid-related lockdowns forced many geoscience instructors to rely on surrogate activities as alternatives to boots-on-the-ground field trips. For example, the Central Michigan University undergraduate structural geology course replaced its conventional field trip to Baraboo, Wisconsin with a virtual field experience hosted on StraboSpot that was developed by Basil Tikoff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using this tool, our students were able to observe outcrops, measure structural features, and draw conclusions much as they would in the field. To my surprise and delight, students participating in the virtual field trip reported high satisfaction with it on end-of-course evaluations.

Consequently, after travel restrictions were subsequently lifted, I chose to run the virtual version of the Baraboo field trip two weeks prior to taking my students into the field to visit many of the same localities. This approach had several pedagogical advantages. For instance, it provided students with an overall framework that helped them focus on key features of each locality we visited. However, it also forced me to redesign the physical field trip to emphasize deductive rather than inductive reasoning.

When instructors organize a field trip using the more conventional inductive approach, their students make observations, recognize patterns, and try to ‘figure things out’ to draw general conclusions at the end. This instructional method is commonly employed at geologic field camp, where students are expected to interpret the geologic history of a site from field observations.

Alternatively, a deductive approach asks students to begin with an existing theory, formulate hypotheses, and then make observations that support or refute their hypotheses. For the combined Baraboo experience, having already seen ‘the big picture’ via the virtual trip, my students were prepared to formulate ideas about what they expected to see at each stop, make observations to confirm/refute those expectations, and develop alternative hypotheses if their observations didn’t fit their existing mental model. Moreover, they were empowered to develop a questioning mindset that supports the improvement of critical thinking skills and prepares them for inductive problem solving at field camp.