FIN Commons

Summary

Mt. San Antonio College’s Earth Sciences & Astronomy Department is conducting an investigation entitled “Designing Field Trips That Improve Critical Thinking, Writing, Communication, and Quantitative Skills: Incorporating Basic Skills Into Natural Sciences Courses.” Team members will develop a suite of activities and field trip materials to increase active learning, analytical writing, speaking, and quantitative and qualitative problem-solving during field trips.  To prepare students applying concepts learned in the classroom to a field environment, new classroom activities will also be designed and implemented before field trips. Faculty and student mentors will work together in the field to provide small-group instruction. The primary focus is to investigate how applying Math, English, and critical thinking in these real-world environments affects students’ basic skill development.

Team Leader:
Becca Walker / Earth Sciences and Astronomy
909-594-5611 x 6339 Fax: 909-468-4036
rwalker@mtsac.edu

Team Members:
Dr. Terri Smith Long / Earth Sciences and Astronomy; tlong@mtsac.edu
Dr. Mark Boryta / Earth Sciences and Astronomy; mboryta@mtsac.edu
Karen Bridges / Earth Sciences and Astronomy; kbridges@mtsac.edu

Plans for Data Collection and Analysis

A.    Zoom-Lens Inquiry: Focusing on Students

1)    What data will you gather and analyze on individual students? (e.g. student work, self-reflections, interviews, videotaped think-alouds or problem-solving)

Video footage of students in the field, reflective writing (journals, field trip reports), observations from student mentors, student focus groups, (possibly) informal student presentations in the field for geol14, objective and written questions on exams related to field trips.

2)    How do you imagine this data will help you understand the problem/issue you’re investigating? In other words, how does the data connect to and inform the overall focus of your inquiry?

I’ve included the questions that our team originally proposed to address. Without data from our students, we can reflect about our teaching and speculate about why students struggle with transferring classroom knowledge to a field environment, but this reflection is not student-centered. The only way to design a student-centered inquiry is to observe our students, hear from our students, read what our students have to say, and assess how our students transfer what they learned in the classroom to a field site (AND how they transfer what they learned in the field to a classroom environment) in the context of exams.

• Which teaching and learning strategies in the field most effectively maximize self-directed learning and problem-solving?
• How can we make field trips more meaningful to students enrolled only in the lecture section of a course (as opposed to students enrolled in both lecture and lab)?
• How can we incorporate more writing and quantitative reasoning into our field trips?
• How can we prepare our students to apply scientific principles and critical thinking learned in the classroom to both familiar and unfamiliar fields?
• How can we change students’ expectations about how they should be learning during field trips? How do we move away from the model in which the professor tells the students what they are seeing and toward the model in which students engage in a self-directed inquiry and ask themselves what they are seeing?

3)    When and how will you collect this data? (e.g. Which classes will you target? Where will you conduct interviews or think-alouds?)

Data will be collected from the following courses: geol1 (physical geology); geol8 (Earth science); geol9 (environmental geology); geol14/24 (field studies of Central California). We will collect data from “traditional” field trips during spring 2009 and from “restructured” field trips during fall 2009. Data collection will occur April-May and October-November 2009.

4)    When will you analyze this data? (e.g. mid-semester team retreat, after lesson-study session, at the end of the semester; )

Data analysis will begin in April 2009. We envision the analysis process as being continuous, with focused analysis during group meetings. We think that it would be interesting to have the instructor of the course in question analyze the data separately from the other collaborators and then compare their observations.

5)     What questions/concerns do you have about this element of your Inquiry? How can your Inquiry Coach support you in this phase of your Inquiry?

We have a lot of ideas about data collection during field trips, but we haven’t solidified the types of classroom data that we want to collect. For example, we anticipate including questions on exams to obtain some quantitative classroom data. We are feeling slightly overwhelmed about the volume of video footage that we have the potential to collect in the field. (Our field trips are 2-4 days long!)

B.    Mid-Range Shots: Focusing on the Classroom

1)    Please name ONE specific lesson in a particular course that will give you a good vantage point for observing student learning relevant to your Inquiry.

Weathering is the process by which rocks are broken down physically (i.e., size and shape changes) and chemically (i.e., change in chemical composition by the addition and/or removal of minerals). Weathering has implications for landscape development and natural hazards and is a topic addressed in all four of the courses (physical geology, Earth science, environmental geology, and field studies of Central California) on which our inquiry will focus.

2)    How do you imagine the Lesson Study will help you understand the problem/issue you’re investigating about students and their learning? In other words, how does it connect to and inform the overall focus of your inquiry?

All rocks at the Earth’s surface experience weathering. Weathering is a concept that we teach in the classroom and is observable at every field trip site that we visit. Despite our coverage of weathering in the classroom, students have a difficult time recognizing weathering features in the field. We are scratching our heads about this because when we discuss weathering processes in the classroom, we often show photographs of rocks that have been weathered by the process in question. For example, why is it that students know what “oxidation” means and have seen photographs of oxidized rocks in the classroom but can’t consistently identify oxidized rocks on the field trip?

3)    When and how will your team conduct this Lesson Study? Please detail the time frames and participants for the three parts of the Lesson Study process (collaboratively planning the lesson, teaching/observing the lesson, and debriefing/analyzing videotapes & student work from the lesson).

Lesson study will be designed during the spring 2009 semester by all FIG participants. Lesson studies will differ slightly for all four courses depending on the specific weathering features that will be observed in the field for each course. Boryta will teach the lesson study for physical geology; Bridges will teach the lesson study for environmental geology; Walker will teach the lesson study for Earth science; and Long/Walker will co-teach the lesson study for field studies of Central California. One observer will be present for each lesson study. Debriefing and analysis will occur collaboratively.

4) What questions/concerns do you have about this element of your Inquiry? How can your Inquiry Coach support you in this phase of your Inquiry?

We need to identify the learning objectives related to weathering for each course and develop a rubric for the observers. Video may be utilized.

C.    Wide-Angle Lens: Focusing on Larger Trends in Institutional Data

What data from your Institutional Research Office will you integrate into your Inquiry?

We’re not sure yet! Myra and I talked about how to relate the results of our inquiry to course-level SLOs…..We imagine that how our project and the institutional data fit together will become clearer as we collect and analyze our data.

D.    Video Footage
We are asking each team to collect at least 10 hours of video footage in the Spring semester.

1)    How will this footage inform the central questions of your Inquiry?

The video footage is going to be a huge part of our inquiry because we are often too busy on a field trip to recognize where our students are struggling most. Looking at footage from all of our students will allow us to identify patterns and determine which concepts In addition, we hope that the video footage will give us ideas about which specific skills (i.e., quantitative skills, large-scale observations, small-scale observations, rock descriptions, geologic interpretations, writing, oral communication) are most problematic for our students. Ideally, these data will guide us in changing our classroom instruction and implementation of new field trip activities and teaching strategies.

2)    What questions/concerns do you have about this element of your Inquiry? Is there  any support you’d like from the FIN Leadership Team in this area?

None of us are video experts, and we don’t have time to teach AND film simultaneously in the field. Student mentors and/or volunteers will assume a central role in videotaping in the field. We are concerned about whether or not our students will feel comfortable being videotaped in the field and whether the presence of a camera will change the dynamic on the field trip. We will need to figure out how to make the video process as unobtrusive as possible. Tech support from the FIN leadership team will probably be necessary.

E.    Inclusion of Student Voices

Please describe how you plan to include student voices in your Inquiry (e.g. hiring students to capture video footage, interview other students, review data from your inquiry and tell you what they see).

Student mentors, alumni of the courses in question with strong content knowledge, communication skills, and work ethic, will be involved in the inquiry process. Mentors’ primary role will be working with faculty on field trips to provide small group instruction.  In addition, mentors will assist with the development of video footage designed to model how to think like a geologist in the field. Video footage will show the mentors engaging in self-directed learning at specific field trip sites. Mentors will answer a systematic series of questions while observing the outcrop. This will allow students in the class to understand the metacognitive processes that should occur when they attempt to interpret a geologic outcrop during their upcoming field trip. Because we believe that student mentors will provide valuable observations of student learning in the field, we are still discussing how to best involve student mentors in the analysis phase of our project.

Timeline/Calendar

Winter 2009: FIG members wrote narratives reflecting on their field trip philosophies, their perceived strengths and weaknesses as field trip leaders, and students’ strengths and weaknesses as field trip participants. Walker met with the Institutional Research Department at Mt. SAC to discuss linking project to course-level SLOs. Student mentor selection process began.

Spring 2009:

• FIG will meet regularly to engage in peer-to-peer faculty development. We plan to discuss our individual experiences with field trips,  share observations that we have made about where our students struggle in the field, reflect on the teaching techniques that we use on in the classroom and on field trips, and hypothesize about which techniques are most beneficial to our students and which could be improved.
  
• Finish selecting student mentors and prepare them for field responsibilities.
• Develop field trip SLOs.
• Design and implement lesson study.
• FIG and student mentors will observe student learning during field trips and collect student data through interviews in the field, videotaping, debriefing, journaling, and field trip reports.
• Note: Because this semester’s field trips will serve as the “control group” in the inquiry process, we do not plan on modifying our field trips significantly during the spring semester. The data from this semester will serve as a basis for comparison to next semester’s field trip data.

Spring and summer 2009:

• Based on analysis of field trip data from spring 2009, FIG will work collaboratively to develop field trip materials, activities, and pedagogical strategies that target critical thinking, writing, quantitative, and communication skills. Classroom curriculum modifications will be planned as well. Student mentors will assist in the design process.

Fall 2009:

• We will repeat the process of data acquisition in the field, this time using the field trip materials that we designed targeting basic skills. We will focus our efforts on Geol1 (physical geology), Geol8/8L (Earth science), Geol14/24 (field studies of Central California), and Geol9 (environmental geology).
• We will conduct a comparison of the “traditional” spring 2009 field trips and the restructured fall 2009 field trips. This comparison will involve faculty and mentor interviews and focus groups, including field trip questions on exams to assess student mastery of basic skills and course concepts, and peer-to-peer discussions within the faculty inquiry group.

Although additional data collection and assessment may occur during year 2 of the project, our focus for year 2 will be dissemination of results to the campus community.