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”
-