s trategies and perceptions of field note - taking : i nsights from a geothermal field lesson jackie...

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, 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

jdohaney@gmail.com

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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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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