Increasing lecture size to create time for small-group laboratory-style activities in introductory geology at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

Introductory geology serves as a general education requirement for a wide variety of non-science majors at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and represents an excellent opportunity to teach fundamental science learning objectives including observation, description and hypothesis testing through the familiar lens of our natural surroundings. However, the existing format for introductory geology classes at Cal Poly, consisting of multiple 60–70 student sections in a traditional lecture setting for four hours per week, precluded significant student–teacher interaction, and made it impossible for students to get the hands-on experience that is an essential component of introductory geology classes. To increase the component of experiential learning in this class, we reformatted the class by combining the multiple sections into a supersized 120–180 student lecture that meets for only three hours per week; time saved through section combination and the reduction of traditional lecture hours was used to create 4–6 one-hour activity sections when students receive their fourth hour of contact time in a laboratory classroom. These activity sections serve as mini-labs in which students gain experience making descriptive observations, interpret data, and working through tutorials that accompany hand samples, maps, and graphs, while simultaneously providing an important opportunity for one-on-one interaction between students and professors. We feel that the benefits of the increased experiential learning in the activity sections have outweighed the increased student-teacher ratio in the supersized lecture, and at least anecdotally, student evaluations regarding the new class have been positive, and achievement of specific class learning objectives has improved on exams. In the future, we hope to continue to increase the ratio of time occupied by problem solving activities in introductory geology at Cal Poly through introduction of small-group breakout sessions for use during the supersized lecture periods.