s trategies and perceptions of field note - taking : i nsights from a geothermal field lesson jackie...
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STRATEGIES AND PERCEPTIONS OF FIELD NOTE-TAKING: INSIGHTS FROM A GEOTHERMAL FIELD LESSON
Jackie Dohaney, E. Brogt, B. Kennedy
Postdoctoral Fellow, Geoscience Education
Why research field note-taking?
1. Note-taking skills are fundamental in the geosciences.
2. Important for data collection, observation-making 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.
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 note-taking) 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.
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 fieldOrakei Korako
North Island, New Zealand
FIELD NOTE-TAKINGHochstetter’s
Cauldron
Field Data:
Notebooks Video Obvs.
FIELD NOTE-TAKING
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 dataCould be context/content-specific
FIELD NOTE-TAKINGLecturer Differences
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 NOTE-TAKINGField Experience
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
FIELD NOTE-TAKINGAdditional data:Gender Influences
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)
Interview Data:
FIELD NOTE-TAKING
“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)
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
FIELD NOTE-TAKING
Thank You! Any Questions?
Jackie Dohaney
Postdoctoral Fellow, Geoscience Education
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)
FIELD NOTE-TAKING
NOTE-TAKING STRATEGY population
variable
N Mean SD Two-sample
t-Test Effect size Cohen’s d
UNIQUENESS All students (N=42)
Lecturer differences
Lecturer 1 (19) Lecturer 2 (23)
34.89 41.84
8.96 10.29
t: 2.31 p-value: 0.02 significant
0.72 “medium”
PRIMARY GOALS CONTENT All students (N=42)
Lecturer differences
Lecturer 1 (19) Lecturer 2 (23)
84.4 92.3
7.5 4.3
t: 4.24 p-value: 0.0001 significant
1.28 “very large”
UNIQUENESS All students (N=42)
Prev. field experience
Little (21) Lots (17)
35.76 43.41
11.18 8.32
t: -2.34 p-value: 0.02 significant
0.78 “medium”
Lecturer 1 (N=19) Lecturer 2 (N=23)
Little (11) Lots (7)
Little (10) Lots (10)
31.87 40.23
40.04 45.63
7.77 9.36
13.11 7.16
t: -2.06 p-value: 0.056 significant* t: -1.18 p-value: 0.26 not significant
0.97 “large”
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1
COMPLETENESS All students (N=42)
Gender
Female (18) Male (24)
51.71 44.41
7.66 7.27
t: -3.15 p-value: 0.003 significant
0.98
“large”
Lecturer 1 (N=19) Lecturer 2 (N=23)
Female (7) Male (12)
Female (11) Male (12)
56.32 45.83
48.77 42.99
8.29 6.80
5.86 7.73
distribution of both groups were not normal t: 2.01 p-value: 0.058 significant*
-
0.84 “large”
VERBOSITY All students (N=42)
Gender
Female (18) Male (24)
156 130
37 36
t: 2.3 p-value: 0.03 significant
0.72
“medium”
Lecturer 1 (N=19) Lecturer 2 (N=23)
Female (7) Male (12)
Female (11) Male (12)
170 115
147 145
46 25
28 40
t: 2.94 p-value: 0.02 significant distribution of male group was not normal
1.51 “very large”
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