During the 2025-26 academic year, we surveyed undergraduates in introductory geoscience courses about their interest in topics before and after lecture sessions on minerals, landslides, critical minerals, mass extinctions, and climate. These class sessions were taught with varied levels of instructional reform (low, medium, high) to test if instruction style affects student interest. In the fall semester, students were asked to self-report their interest on a 5-point Likert scale. In the spring semester, students were also asked to report how much they agree or disagree with statements modified from the Situational Interest Survey (Linnenbrink-Garcia et al., 2012) related to the lecture topic. These statements also used a 5-point Likert scale, and are designed to gauge student interest by assessing their feelings, values, and opinions. By comparing self-reported student interest with an instrument that measures interest, we will investigate if self-reporting is a sufficient measure of student interest, or if the increased granularity of a multi-question survey can provide greater insight. We will also investigate the relationship between student interest and the level of instructional reform of each class session.
For the 2026-27 academic year, we seek to investigate the relationship between classroom experiences and geoscience interest among both introductory and major-level students. To do this, we will use the Geoscience Interest Survey (Conner & Lazar, 2026) as a pretest-postest instrument to capture changes that may occur throughout a semester for all academic levels. In addition to these surveys, I will conduct interviews using Critical Incident Technique (CTI) (Flanagan, 1954) to identify incidents that have affected geoscience interest for introductory students and geoscience majors. Within these student interviews, I will ask about specific aspects of classroom instruction that were impactful and look for potential relationships between active learning practices and changes in student interest.