Earth and Mind is excited to have its first guest post. Dr. Dexter Perkins teaches geology, environmental issues, mineralogy, and ore deposits courses in the Geology Department at the University of North Dakota. Well known for his interest in teaching, Dexter is an active participant in the On the Cutting Edge program and has published extensively on the Teach the Earth websites.
According to
Brain Rules (Medina 2009) students don't pay attention to boring things. They don't learn, Medina says, things that don't interest them. While this is not surprising, it got me thinking about what I could do to get students more interested in the content of my introductory geology class. One possibility, of course, is to find ways to make it all very interesting. But, I have tried this before and, despite my best efforts, don't seem to be able to do this as well as I would like. There are always some students who find what we do to be yawn-inducing, and there are always some topics that just do not seem to excite students no matter what I do.
So, I decided to survey the students and find out what they find most exciting. What if I only teach the things that students find most exciting? Wouldn't that contribute more to their education than trying to get them to learn boring things? Wouldn't it help them become better learners and thinkers – which I tell them is the most important thing?
Of course, students won't get exposed to the full breadth of a typical introductory geology class if we don't cover the less interesting material. But most of my students don't need all that information – most only take geology to fulfill a general education requirement and will never take another geology class. And, the students who are going to be geology majors? My argument to myself was that they would figure it all out when they needed to anyway.
Unsure of where I was going with this, I surveyed the students. I gave them a list of topics that we focused on during the semester and asked them to rate topics on a scale of 1 to 5 according to how interesting and engaging they found the topic. After they finished that, I asked them to rate the topics according to whether they thought the topic was an important part of the class. The chart below gives average responses from 70 students.
Figure 1. Topics are ordered from those that students found most interesting and engaging on the left, to least interesting and engaging on the right. Blue bars show average interest/engagement. Red bars show students assessment of the importance of each topic.
As the chart here shows, a most interesting geology class would focus on volcanoes, earthquakes, plate tectonics, energy resources, climate change and geomorphology. We spent quite a bit of time talking about metacognition, learning and thinking during the semester and the students seem to like that too. At the other end of the scale, the things that were least popular included topics related to mineralogy and petrology – my fields of specialization.
The level of importance assigned to a topic is quite uniform. The things they found most interesting were rated slightly higher in importance, in general, but the range of responses was not great. Apparently, lack of interest did not mean that students did not recognize that something was important, which surprised me a bit. They listed energy resources and climate change as the most important topics – which are probably the two that I would have chosen, too.
As cute and attractive as it may be, I don't really think that I will toss out a traditional geology curriculum the next time I teach introductory geology. But I do think there are some changes I can make in response to student interest. I can change the emphasis in some parts of the semester, and I can make sure that as much as possible I relate everything to the things that students find interesting. I did not ask them specifically, but I think that one reason they like earthquakes and volcanoes is because they find disasters and death to be interesting. I can certainly talk about disaster such as floods in other parts of the class. And throughout the semester I can always try to have a hook – something that will engage students – for every class.
Beyond the adjustments mentioned above, however, I am not sure what else I can and should do. I would welcome any suggestions that anyone has.
