STRATEGIES AND PERCEPTIONS OF FIELD NOTE-TAKING: INSIGHTS FROM A GEOTHERMAL FIELD LESSON Jackie Dohaney, E. Brogt, B. Kennedy Postdoctoral Fellow, Geoscience Education jdohaney@gmail.com Why research field note-taking? 1. Note-taking skills are fundamental in the geosciences. 2. Important for data collection, observationmaking and forming hypotheses. 3. Usually not explicitly taught in programs. They are commonly learned via: holistic, piecemeal ‘best practices’. passed down from more experienced geologists. FIELD NOTE-TAKING Research Objective: To determine strategies that students’ use during note-taking. - Review existing literature (classroom studies). - Design and carry out a case study - Uncover strategies, and factors that influence strategies - Inform field pedagogy FIELD NOTE-TAKING Case Study Design 1. One field outcrop, new field area; students from diverse field experiences 2. Set learning goals and protocol with Lecturer(s) 3. Collect hardcopy notes (n=42) 4. Carry out post-interview (reflect on notetaking) with subset of students (n=16) 5. Examine students’ notes for content. FIELD NOTE-TAKING Student Participants (n = 42) Gender: (female = 18; male = 24), Nationality: (Netherlands (1), United Kingdom (1), New Zealand (9), United States of America (31)). Age: mostly 19 – 21; subset of 22 - 46 (n = 7). Major: Mostly geology (26) ; Env. science students (8) and engineers (8), Geology field experience*: none (4), little (21), lots (17) *Determined using the number of field trips, the number of days in the field (total) and any independent research experience (e.g., summer internships) prior to the study. ‘Lots’ = >3 field trips and/or more than 20 days in the field (total) and any independent field experience. Hochstetter’s Cauldron FIELD NOTE-TAKING Field Course Frontiers Abroad semester abroad trip 2-5 week field course Advanced field techniques (i.e., 300- or 400-level) Course topics - physical volcanology & geothermal geology Taught by two lecturers, on two separate days Field site – Geothermal field Orakei Korako North Island, New Zealand FIELD NOTE-TAKING Field Data: Notebooks Video Obvs. First glance: Notebooks contained observations (green!), interpretations, contextual info, location information, etc. Some students copied verbatim what the professors said, and included many extraneous details (red+pink) Uniqueness & Completeness Two obvious strategies emerged: To write in their own words while others preferred to write verbatim what the lecturer said. -> Uniqueness To write complete notes (i.e., including all the information discussed as a class) while others missed a lot of important observations -> Completeness Similar findings from classroom studies: Ganske (1981), Barnett and Freud (1985) Uniqueness & Completeness Uniqueness = U represents the total number of unique phrases and V represents the total number of verbatim phrases. Completeness = E – extra observations, and T is total observations made by their class. Note: Completeness is not an absolute value (representing all of the possible observations than can be made). FIELD NOTE-TAKING Boundaries: 50% (arbitrary cut off); solid lines Use of mean (of population); dotted lines Need more data Could be context/contentspecific Lecturer Differences FIELD NOTE-TAKING Differences in pedagogy, focus on specific content Lecturer 1 included lots of context and higher order interp.(not Primary LG) Lecturer 2 included repeated prompts to ‘Think for yourself’ Lecturer 2’s students had higher Uniqueness (p=0.02; medium effect size) Field Experience FIELD NOTE-TAKING Field experience improves ‘Uniqueness’ (between Lots and Little categories; p=0.02; medium effect size) No correlation to coursework Proxy for independent thinking and higher cognitive functioning Additional data: Gender Influences FIELD NOTE-TAKING Women had statistically significant higher completeness (p=0.003; large effect size) When probing the data, we found that women also wrote more (verbosity; n of words total) (p=0.03, medium effect size) FIELD NOTE-TAKING Interview Data: “Yea, I was basically just writing down everything, because we were getting so much information thrown at us, at the time. And like, I didn’t know what was important. So then, I was just writing it all down” (Low-performing 2) “... you have to write things down... it makes you deal with it... You can’t just say ‘there’s orange stuff here’. Like there is orange stuff here, but it could be ‘this’, or ‘this’ and it’s a process. It makes you reason more, or process the ideas more in your head. Otherwise you might just skip over things...” (Dual-strategy 1) FIELD NOTE-TAKING Factors that Influence Note-taking: Social environment – distracting Physical environment – curiosity/excitement Level of detail required (how much should be recorded?) – overwhelming, difficult to manage All of these contributed to a high cognitive load during the task. Students with more experience could have more opportunities to practice filtering their environment, and stay focused. FIELD NOTE-TAKING Suggestions for Note-taking Learning goals should be clearly communicated. Note-taking tasks can be broken into smaller parts (e.g., Start with the larger perspective then progress to the smaller perspective Let students reflect and organize their notes. Establish field site ‘etiquette’ (to reduce social distractions and to initiate and maintain focus.) Once an introductory lesson has been completed, fullest complexity. (Emphasis in the later lessons should be on fine-tuning these skills.) FIELD NOTE-TAKING Future Work: 1) Digital note-taking 2) Sketching (& the relationship to note-taking and observation-making) 3) Other strategies – efficiency, accuracy Thank You! Any Questions? Jackie Dohaney Postdoctoral Fellow, Geoscience Education jdohaney@gmail.com FIELD NOTE-TAKING Limitations & Caveats 1. Introductory field lesson (not independent mapping). 2. Experiment not initially set up for some factors (e.g., Gender) 3. Other strategies (efficiency, accuracy, etc.) may be dominant and not accounted for here. 4. Much more cool research to do. (Field notes are) “...external representations of student’s cognition in the field” (Balliet 2012) NOTE-TAKING STRATEGY population Two-sample t-Test Effect size Cohen’s d N Lecturer differences Mean SD Lecturer 1 (19) Lecturer 2 (23) Lecturer differences 34.89 41.84 8.96 10.29 All students (N=42) Lecturer 1 (19) Lecturer 2 (23) Prev. field experience 84.4 92.3 7.5 4.3 All students (N=42) Little (21) Lots (17) 35.76 43.41 11.18 8.32 t: -2.34 p-value: 0.02 significant 0.78 “medium” 7.77 9.36 t: -2.06 p-value: 0.056 significant* 0.97 “large” 13.11 7.16 t: -1.18 p-value: 0.26 not significant UNIQUENESS All students (N=42) PRIMARY GOALS CONTENT UNIQUENESS Lecturer 1 (N=19) Lecturer 2 (N=23) 1 variable Little (11) Lots (7) Little (10) Lots (10) 31.87 40.23 40.04 45.63 t: 2.31 p-value: 0.02 significant t: 4.24 p-value: 0.0001 significant 0.72 “medium” 1.28 “very large” - COMPLETENESS All students (N=42) Lecturer 1 (N=19) Lecturer 2 (N=23) VERBOSITY All students (N=42) Lecturer 1 (N=19) Lecturer 2 (N=23) 1 Gender Female (18) Male (24) Female (7) Male (12) Female (11) Male (12) Gender Female (18) Male (24) Female (7) Male (12) Female (11) Male (12) 51.71 44.41 56.32 45.83 48.77 42.99 156 130 170 115 147 145 7.66 7.27 t: -3.15 p-value: 0.003 significant 0.98 “large” 8.29 6.80 distribution of both groups were not normal 5.86 7.73 t: 2.01 p-value: 0.058 significant* 37 36 t: 2.3 p-value: 0.03 significant 0.72 “medium” 46 25 t: 2.94 p-value: 0.02 significant 1.51 “very large” 28 40 distribution of male group was not normal - 0.84 “large” -