EXPLORING STUDENT SPATIAL SKILL NEEDS FOR SEQUENCE STRATIGRAPHIC INTERPRETATION (Invited Presentation)

The relationship between geoscience task completion and spatial thinking has been widely recognized in the geoscience education community and industry. Understanding which spatial skills are needed for which geologic tasks is key to developing training that strengthens one’s ability related to the geologic task and spatial skill. This talk will first discuss how to select an appropriate spatial cognitive test that may align with the geologic task. We will focus on Sequence stratigraphy and the development of the study for part two. The second part of this talk will focus on a study to assess student spatial skills in mental folding/unfolding and disembedding. This study sought to: 1) assess the impact of student disembedding and mental folding/unfolding skills on sequence identification skills, and 2) categorize student errors as conceptual or spatial. The study included advanced undergraduate and graduate geology majors enrolled in a sedimentology/stratigraphy course or sequence stratigraphy course. Students completed a pre-post wheeler diagram task that assessed their understanding after instruction on sequence stratigraphy but before instruction on Wheeler diagrams. The results of a simple linear regression show that both spatial skills are predictive of student sequence stratigraphic interpretation skills. However, a nested regression shows that only mental folding is predictive of student sequence stratigraphic interpretation skills. This means that the variance accounted for in the simple regressing for disembedding is accounted for by the mental folding/unfolding task. This may mean that the skill of mental folding/unfolding requires one to disembedded but leaves the connection between disembedding and sequence stratigraphy unclear. Finally, this study will discuss a qualitative assessment of student work that categorizes student errors into common categories: 1) Fundamental Concepts, 2) Subaerial erosional unconformities, 3) correlative conformities, and 4) sequence identification. This study will highlight how they connect to training. Pairing the results the regression and qualitative understanding of student errors provides a platform for the development of training materials at the undergraduate, graduate, and industry levels that can focus on both conceptual and spatial errors that are likely to occur.