Assessing and Addressing Students' Scientific Literacy Needs in Physical Geology

Exacting excellence equally from university students around the globe can be accomplished by providing all students with necessary background tools to achieve mastery of their courses, even if those tools are not part of normal content. As instructors we hope to see our students grasp the substance of our courses, make mental connections between course material and practical applications, and use this knowledge to make informed decisions as citizens. Yet many educators have found that students enter university-level introductory courses in mathematics, science and engineering without adequate academic preparation. As part of a FIPSE-funded project at the University of Wyoming, the instructors of the Physical Geology course have taken a new approach to tackling the problem of lack of scientific/mathematic skills in incoming students. Instead of assuming that students should already know or will learn these skills on their own, they assess students' needs and provide them the opportunity to master scientific literacies as they learn geologic content. In the introductory geology course, instructors identified two categories of literacies, or basic skills that are necessary for academic success and citizen participation. Fundamental literacies include performing simple quantitative calculations, making qualitative assessments, and reading and analyzing tables and graphs. Technical literacies are those specific to understanding geology, and comprise the ability to read maps, visualize changes through time, and conceptualize in three dimensions. Because these skills are most easily taught in lab, the in-house lab manual was rewritten to be both literacy- and content-based. Early labs include simple exercises addressing literacies in the context of geological science, and each subsequent lab repeats exposure to literacies, but at increasing levels of difficulty. Resources available to assist students with literacy mastery include individual instruction, a detailed appendix to the lab manual explaining simple tasks such as converting units, and web-based resources. To document the progress of this program, students take pre- and post-course surveys assessing their grasp of the literacies. The surveys gather data on demographics, background, level of interest, level of confidence, understanding, and willingness to complete additional problem sets. This information has been integral in identifying areas of greatest weakness, least interest, and in gauging how backgrounds, expectations, and students' confidence affect their performance.