Geology of Utah's National Parks and Monuments: A Field-Based Education Program

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HUNTOON 9809813 The aim of this project is to develop, conduct, and assess the effectiveness of a new, field-based course designed to give beginning geoscience and earth science education students, and professional earth science educators an opportunity to obtain hands-on experience solving research-type questions. The mix of students is targeted so that professional educators can act as mentors for undergraduate students during the course an encourage undergraduates to pursue a career in teaching. The general goals of the project are: 1) an increase in motivation and technical competence of participating university students; and, 2) an increase in the number of technically competent and motivated professional geoscientists who pursue careers in teaching. The course will be taught primarily in southeastern Utah, and will use the excellent geologic features exposed in Canyonlands, Arches and Capitol Reef National Parks, and Natural Bridges and Dinosaur National Monuments as teaching aids. Key components of the course that are expected to contribute to attainment of its goals are: a field-based learning environment, a focus on problem solving, use of experimental learning methods, use of intensive instruction modules, encouragement of group learning, emphasis on development and testing of hypotheses, the requirement that information from a variety of sources be integrated, an emphasis on the processes responsible for producing what is observed in the field, extensive incorporation of communication experiences, and the course's ability to provide students with a framework for future learning. The course's success at meeting the goals will be assessed using a suite of pre-course/post-course attitude surveys and an instrument designed to measure higher-order cognitive skills. A diagnostic learning log instrument will be used to measure students' progress during the course.