In recent years many U.S. colleges and universities have created programs for
incoming freshmen to address a growing range of issues, including the unacceptably
large number of first-year students who do not return for their second year.
At the University of Cincinnati, this effort has taken shape as the Freshman
Year Experience (FYE) program.
In the College of Arts and Sciences, the FYE program was designed with many
of the same kinds of components found elsewhere, including learning communities,
personalized advising and freshman seminars. These seminars typically follow
one of two different models: either a discipline-oriented seminar led by faculty
members or a college survival course taught by student affairs personnel who
alert students to issues, such as time management, approaches to studying, the
use of technology for effective learning and how to access the many resources
of the institution. The college opted for both formats and proceeded to invite
faculty members to offer seminars in their respective disciplines. Enrollments
were capped at 20 to ensure high personal contact with the instructor. I proposed
a course entitled “Investigating the Earth” and further capped the
enrollment at 10 so that getting everyone in a van for a field trip would not
be a problem. The course was accepted and we were off and running.
The principal concept in “Investigating the Earth” is to learn by
doing, not a radical idea by any means, but nevertheless a challenging one where
first-year students with no geology background are concerned. Class meetings
are generally held either in the field or in the lab.
At the first class meeting, I present each student with a hand-specimen-sized
rock, providing only the rock’s geographic origin. I then explain to the
students that their assignment by the end of the 10-week fall quarter is to
present a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation on their rock — telling us
what kind of rock it is, how it formed, what it is made of and how it fits into
the geologic history of the area from which it came. The resources available
to the students include a textbook, the library, the Internet and, most importantly,
the lab. The students have homework assignments after each class that include
readings in the text plus either an Excel-based assignment that I have designed
or one of Gary Novak’s virtual activities. The exercises
are graded, but otherwise there are no exams.
First stop: the field. Within 15 minutes of the start of class, we head outside
with a digital camera to photograph each specimen. A half-hour later, we have
finished and we head to the saw room preparing to cut slabs for thin sections.
Given the time limitations, the slabs are sent off to a commercial thin-section
lab that has about a two-week turnaround time. (The FYE program pays for the
cost of the sections.) I tell the students to wear comfortable clothes for the
next two class periods because they will be in the field.
At the beginning of the second class, we pile into a van for the first field
trip. Cincinnati lies in the midst of Late Ordovician platform carbonates and
shales, rich in invertebrate fossils, so our first trip is to look at these
strata up close. We have Richard Davis’ excellent pamphlet, Guide to
the Rocks and Fossils of the Cincinnati Area, handy and students learn how
to tell limestone from shale and trilobites from crinoids from brachiopods.
Our second field trip focuses on the Pleistocene history of the Cincinnati area.
We look at till, lake clays and outwash, and we talk about how to interpret
these deposits. The Ohio Geological Survey has a number of downloadable bedrock
and Quaternary maps, which we use in the field.
For the next several class periods we are in the lab, beginning with powder
X-ray diffraction of each rock sample. Students break off and pulverize a few
grams of rock, and learn to pack the powder into aluminum holders and insert
them into the diffractometer. We scan a sufficient two-theta range to pick up
most common rock-forming minerals, and students are given the choice of plotting
their scans directly or downloading the data into an Excel spreadsheet.
At this stage, much work is one-on-one, although we still come together on a
regular schedule to discuss what we have done and what’s coming next. I
give the class a number of reference Web sites to get started, and they are
encouraged to do their own searching as well. Group meetings often consist of
discussions about the concepts that the students have encountered and of identifying
portions of the textbook that address those areas.
When the thin sections arrive, we set up petrographic scopes to look at them.
This is always an exciting experience and we use one scope with digital projection
capability so the group can also look at each section in turn. We take digital
photos of each section to add to an online data collection. The last several
class meetings are devoted to class presentations. The students are now fully
engaged in their projects, and the atmosphere borders on electric as each one,
in turn, gets up for their presentation. The experience has a powerful bonding
effect on the group.
Although the University of Cincinnati has been at this for only a short time,
overall college retention has increased by more than 5 percent. Our anecdotal
evidence indicates that the students who benefit the most from freshman seminars
are those who are talented but who were underachievers in high school. And we
always draw one or two geology majors out of each class. It’s a double
bonus — getting more people excited about geology, while inspiring a new
generation of geologists.
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