Undergraduate Research in Geoscience at Mt. San Antonio College

Departmental/Institutional Context

Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) is a single-campus, suburban community college in Walnut, CA (Los Angeles County) with over 35,000 credit students. The Earth Sciences and Astronomy Department, which resides within the Natural Sciences Division, has 5 full-time geoscience faculty and 3 full-time astronomy faculty. We offer courses in geology, oceanography, meteorology, and astronomy, most of which satisfy the Physical Science General Education requirement necessary for transfer to a 4-year institution.

Research Program Description

Project goals:

• Provide freshman and sophomore-level undergraduates with an Early Research Experience for Undergraduates (E-REU) opportunity. (Most REU programs are geared toward junior and senior level undergraduates. First and second-year geoscience students at 2YCs are at a competitive disadvantage for various reasons.)
• Facilitate an increased understanding of the research process.
• Train students in selected field (stream profiling, pace measuring, sediment collecting, use of topographic maps, bedrock geologic mapping) and laboratory (sieving, grain size studies, roundness studies, microscopy) techniques; organization, plotting, and analysis of data.
• Prompt thinking about the complexity of a natural system and compare real data to the idealized model of sediment evolution with increased distance from the source that is generally taught in intro-level courses.

For the next 3 semesters, we used a peer instruction model in which faculty accompanied students on one field day and observed returning students training new students in field techniques. Subsequently, returning students and new students conducted additional fieldwork without faculty, and returning students trained new students in lab techniques. As the project evolved, faculty-student meeting were held 2x/month and focused on plotting and interpreting data (grain size plots, ternary diagrams, etc.)

Participation in GEOL99 has a presentation requirement. Students have presented posters at local events (Kepler Scholarship event at Mt. SAC), regional meetings (GSA Cordilleran Section meeting in Fresno), and national meetings (AGU 2012, GSA Denver 2013.)

Outcomes and Benefits

Challenges and Solutions

The most significant challenge that we're currently facing is the issue of repeatability. Recent state mandates prohibit students from receiving credit for the same course more than once, which means that once a student takes GEOL99 for one semester, that's it. This has resulted in a temporary hiatus of our research program because (a) most of the students who want to take GEOL99 have taken it already; (b) it eliminates the peer training component, which is an integral part of the program. We have learned that students need several semesters of engagement in the research process to benefit most from the program. As such, we are trying to develop a sequence of research courses (ex: GEOL99A, GEOL99B, GEOL99C), each with different course measurable objectives, to allow students to continue participating in the program for multiple semesters.

GEOL99 does not count as part of our teaching load. It is challenging, to say the least, to devote the amount of time that we would like to mentoring, discussion of data, field work, instruction in lab techniques, etc. when we are already teaching 5-6 other courses.

Other challenges include:

1. Lack of funding to send students to meetings to present their work. We encourage our students to volunteer at meetings to subsidize their meeting costs, share lodging, and attend as many functions with free food as possible! Also, attending local and regional meetings is more cost-effective than national meetings.
2. Lack of access to peer-reviewed literature makes it difficult for students to conduct lit reviews. We have done what we can to scrounge up papers or "borrow" subscriptions from colleagues, but we feel as though we could be doing a better job with this.
   

Keys to Success

• It is imperative to have regular (ideally, weekly, but at least once every 2 weeks) group meetings in which students present specific deliverables.
• For students who have never dabbled in research, there is often a misconception that they will be able to "finish" the project in one semester—for example, some of our students assumed that they would be able to conduct a complete sedimentological analysis of the entire watershed in one semester—so that misconception should be addressed early in the program.
• Peer instruction is tremendously valuable for new and veteran students. Faculty can serve a quality control role in the peer instruction process by observing students in the field and lab to make sure that techniques are being performed systematically and correctly.
  

Resources

Walker, B., and Boryta, M., 2013, An early undergraduate research experience for community college students: benefits, challenges, and lessons learned from faculty and students, Geological Society of America Abstracts With Programs, vol. 45, no. 7, p. 570.

Ketting-Olivier, A., De Martinez, L., Miller, A., Chi, B., Lee, T., Boryta, M., Mrofka, D., and Walker, B., 2013, Increased angularity of sand-sized grains reflecting fluvial processes of Trabuco Creek, Orange County, CA: preliminary results from a community college research experience, Geological Society of America Abstracts With Programs, v., 45, no. 7, p. 571.

Boryta, M., Walker, B., Carlos, R., Carrizal, J.T., Chi, B., De Martinez, L, Diaz, M.A., Hoffmann, A., Ketting-Olivier, A., and Villanueva, L., 2013, Sustainable and meaningful research opportunities for community college students, Geological Society of America Abstracts With Programs, vol. 45, no. 6, p. 61.

Walker, B. (2012). Developing meaningful and manageable research opportunities for community college students: lessons learned from semester #1. Essay for 2012 workshop Preparing Students in Two-year Colleges for Geoscience Degrees and Careers. Tacoma, WA.