184 Geoscience Education: Innovative Approaches to Geoscience Education in Formal and Informal Settings

Tuesday, 6 November 2012
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
209AB

UNIVERSITY TRADITION BECOMES A GEOSCIENCE TEACHING OPPORTUNITY

Paper number: 184-10
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 3:45 PM – 4:00 PM

Authors

Abstract

Each year during the third week of November thousands of students at The Ohio State University jump into Mirror Lake, an artificial pond on campus. This jump occurs in support of the annual football rivalry game. The jump tradition has provided an on-campus opportunity for dozens of geoscience students to plan and carry out a study of water quality in the pond. A student research initiative, begun in 2008, to monitor the pond’s water quality before, during, and after the event clearly documents how humans can affect their environment. A different student in each the four years the study has been conducted acted as project manager, and took on the responsibility to organize teams of geoscience undergraduate and graduate students to collect and analyze water samples. We show how a university tradition has been transformed into an interactive geosciences learning opportunity for the university community. Use of the resultant dataset in the classroom initially sparked student interest in the effects of anthropogenic activities on water quality and then mobilized subsequent studies to test additional hypotheses about how this Earth Science class laboratory may change student attitudes about anthropogenic effects on water quality.

Recent initiatives in geosciences education have focused on interactive learning experiences both in and outside the classroom. While the concept is sound, examples and datasets rarely focused on opportunities to which the students can immediately relate. The pond water quality data from the jump study and from the groundwater adjacent to the pond provide the basis of a laboratory in Earth Sciences 100, a course taken by non-major students to fulfill a general education requirement. The laboratory exercise was developed by graduate students in Ohio State’s School of Earth Sciences and incorporated into the house-published laboratory manual. In order to determine the effect of this laboratory on students’ attitudes about water quality, several laboratory sections were surveyed before and after this exercise in 2011. Analysis of survey data shows significant change in students’ attitudes both about water quality before and after the jump lab and about the role of human activities in changing surface and groundwater quality.