Copy of Pedagogy with geoscience

Useful material on many aspects of lab pedagogy and logistics comes from handbooks designed for university graduate assistants, such as this one from the University of Michigan and this one from Indiana University.

Preparing lab handouts

Faculty members use a variety of methods to construct lab handouts (written material students are expected to read before the start of the lab, materials used during the lab and materials that explain post-lab assignments). In preparing lab handouts, you'll want to consider factors of length, organization, format (on paper, on the web), relationship to pre-existing student knowledge and others. SERC modules on ConcepTests, Just-in-Time Teaching and Knowledge Surveys all provide methods to determine student prior knowledge and pre-conceptions that can be extremely useful in creating and adapting lab handouts.

Structuring time during an indoor lab

Most students need a sense of the goals of the lab, how the work fits into the course and what the faculty expect to happen during and after the lab time. Even if the lab time on a particular day is devoted to working on part of a longer project, it is important to conceive the lab time structurally, with a beginning, middle and end.

Working in groups

Having students work in groups during a lab has many advantages, such as better science, gains in student interpersonal skills, potentially simpler management and potential time savings. Much research on group work suggests a few basic principles: structure assignments so that group work is essential; develop some measures of individual accountability for how the group works; and consider clearly defining different group roles. These and other guidelines are discussed in the cooperative learning module.

Using experiments and monitoring earth systems

Although perhaps not as common in introductory geoscience courses as in other sciences, experiments relevant to earth systems can be done in these courses. Such experiments commonly involve analog modeling with materials that are scaled spatially, temporally, or by property to mimic an earth system.

Students can also collect data on and near the campus (such as water temperatures, soil moisture, rainfall) to analyze and compare with data collected in other places and times.

Combining modeling and data analysis with other lab tasks

Indoor labs can be designed that ask students to combine experimental results or data collected from monitoring with other tasks, such as modeling and data analysis.

Equipment for introductory geoscience indoor labs

Just as one expects to see petri dishes and pipettes as standard equipment in most biology labs, most introductory geoscience labs have certain standard equipment and supplies, including hand lenses, binocular microscopes, maps, air photos, colored pencils, etc.