Campus Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes

What are the student learning outcomes in your unit?

General Education quantitative (mathematical) skills
Scientific Reasoning

Which outcome did you assess this academic year?

Scientific Reasoning – We are specifically interested in understanding the effectiveness of our introductory laboratories (G102) in student learning.

How did you assess their skills before, during and / or at the end of the semester / academic year?

Approximately 42% of our introductory Earth science students enroll simultaneously in both the Introduction to Earth Science lecture course (G101) and the associated laboratory course (G102).  This facilitates comparisons between the lecture-only group, and the lecture + lab group.  We used two separate measures to assess student learning between the two groups.

First, we compared class performance (i.e. final grades) of all introductory lecture-only and all introductory lecture + lab students enrolled during the 2009 – 2010 academic year.  This measure includes, but is not limited to, assessing students’ scientific reasoning skills.

Secondly, we developed pre- and post-tests designed to evaluate application of scientific concepts covered in the introductory earth science course (i.e. students were required to reason scientifically).  The test was given to one introductory lecture class at the beginning and again at the end of the semester.  Pre- and post- test performance of students from the lecture-only group, were compared to those from the lecture + lab group.

Please summarize the data you have collected this semester / academic year.

We are still working on the statistical analyses of the data we collected but our preliminary conclusions are as follows:

For students who took introductory Earth science classes from Summer 2008 – Spring 2010:

Lecture + lab students perform approximately 10% better in the lecture course than lecture-only students.  Our data suggest that this difference is even greater for non-traditional students, though we are still evaluating whether this result is statistically significant.

For the one G101 class given the pre- and post-tests (Spring 2010):

Lecture + lab students performed approximately 21 % better on the post-test than on the pre-test. 

Lecture-only students performed approximately 4% better on the post-test than on the pre-test.

1. 72 % of questions were answered correctly and 28 % answered incorrectly
2. Nontraditional students benefit most from G 102 labs. Nontraditional students who had G 102 Lab concurrently with G 101 Lecture scored 21.1 % better (85.5% of total points) than those not enrolled (70.6% of total points) in the lab.
3. Traditional students enrolled in G 102 lab (81.5% of total points) also increased their performance by 2.6% over traditional students (79.5% of total points) not enrolled in the lab.

Please describe any programmatic changes you have made or are planning to make based on the data you have collected.

Our results indicate that students benefit significantly from taking the introductory laboratory along with the introductory Earth Science lecture course.  Within the Department of Geosciences, we are currently discussing the feasibility of requiring all Earth Science students to enroll in the laboratory.