Assessing the impact of a challenge-based, Collectivist approach to learning on minority student engagement in the Geosciences
Abstract
Out-of-school time high school programs have successfully increased the number of minority students pursuing STEM college majors, but Geoscience remains the least ethnically and racially diverse STEM discipline. Traditional teaching methods--including lectures, quizzes and tests--typically embody Individualistic traits, even though Collectivist ideals tend to resonate more strongly with diverse students. Pedagogical frameworks rarely account for students' cultural identities.
Our study tests whether embodiment of Collectivist ideals in a summer field class leads to increased minority student engagement and interest in Geoscience. We re-structured an existing course for 40 rising 11th grade students from Houston, TX (part of GeoFORCE Texas) to incorporate individualistic (e.g. lectures, quizzes) and collectivist activities. The latter emphasized collaboration, teamwork, and skill-building, and included labs and experiments (i.e. "workshops"), drawing exercises, data collection and problem-solving in the field, and week-long group projects. Student responses to activity-specific surveys indicate similar average "interest" in all activities (7.9±0.2 out of 10, n=292 responses) despite collectivist activities being more "difficult" (5.3±2.5, n=108). Students reported significantly higher "excitement" for collectivist activities compared to individualistic activities (7.5±2 vs. 6.4±2, n=108). Indexing and quantitative analysis of survey results reveal that student descriptions of workshops and problem-solving activities incorporate active verbs that reflect a scientific thought process (e.g. identify, compare, analyze, examine, draw and conduct), whereas descriptions of lectures are passive (e.g. listen, learn, and take notes). Similar analyses of pre- and post-trip surveys show that students' views of Geoscience broadened by the end of the program, with the most specific example being their description of 'what a geoscientist does.' There, the number of responses including "rocks" decreased from 15 to 6. Pre- and post-surveys also reveal that the number of students planning to pursue degrees in STEM and Geoscience respectively increased from 23 to 32 and 4 to 10. Our results highlight the need to include more collectivist activities while teaching geoscience to minorities.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMED32B..04K
- Keywords:
-
- 0805 Elementary and secondary education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0840 Evaluation and assessment;
- EDUCATION