RELEVANCE IN INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE LABORATORY COURSES

Foregrounding the relevance of geoscience content for students may help foster their interest and encourage a wider diversity of future geoscientists (Wolfe & Riggs, 2017). In this study, we investigate the extent to which labs explicitly relate course content to different forms of relevance in introductory geoscience courses. Based on a review of the literature, we created a deductive coding scheme to evaluate labs for three types of relevance: professional relevance, societal relevance, and sociocultural relevance. We then applied this rubric to introductory geoscience labs from four institutions across the United States. For each lab, we divided the text into segments based on formatting and content, then classified the segments as explicitly relevant or not explicitly relevant within each category and subcategory of relevance. We calculated the percentage of segments of each lab that explicitly established one of the three types of relevance. Our preliminary findings suggest that most introductory labs are not consistently explicit in establishing relevance. Roughly 19% of the pilot study sample did not explicitly address relevance to students at all, and the lab with the highest relevance score was explicit about the relevance of the content for only 33% of the lab’s segments. We will also present the results of a comparison between lab relevance scores for each dimension and previously-collected student situational interest scores for the same labs. Based on our preliminary findings, if relevance is a goal for geoscience labs, instructors may need to be more intentional in identifying relevant connections for their students.