Engaging Students to Learn Through the Affective Domain : A new Framework for Teaching in the Geosciences

To motivate student learning, the affective domain—emotion, attitude, and motivation—must be engaged. We propose a model that is specific to the geosciences with theoretical components of motivation and emotion from the field of educational psychology, and a term we are proposing, “connections with Earth” based on research in the fields of environmental education and art education. When all three of these components (motivation, emotion, and connections with Earth) are combined in the classroom, students may experience greater interest in and connection to the content. This interest and connection may lead to greater motivation to learn and value the content. We use our model to evaluate three practices in geoscience education and show that their demonstrated success in achieving student learning lies in the attention to students’ affective needs as well as to delivery of content. We propose a future research agenda using currently developed, validated instruments that can measure these motivational and attitudinal shifts to determine what practices work best for our students from both cognitive and affective perspectives. Although this was conducted in both Europe and the United States, the implications of this research may extend across cultures and nationalities. Additional research needs to be conducted to understand these implications. VC 2011 National Association of Geoscience Teachers. [DOI: 10.5408/1.3543934] INTRODUCTION How many geoscience instructors have walked into their introductory class on the first day and asked the students something along the lines of: “What is your interest in the geosciences?”—only to be met with a deafening silence? How are we to interpret this silence? Is it students’ lack of experience with geoscience prior to college (Ridky, 2002; Willyard, 2008), lack of interest in science in general, a fear of standing out, or is it that most students enroll in the introductory classes only out of necessity, in order to fulfill a science requirement (Gilbert et al., 2009)? As experts, we are aware of the excitement of geology and the fundamental concepts we want our students to learn, but how effective are we at helping our students want to learn these topics? One of our goals as educators is to engage students in learning geoscience so they are motivated to continue learning on their own in informal settings, through additional coursework, or as geoscience majors. In this article, we define geoscience to include any discipline that pertains to studies of Earth, including geology, physical geography, meteorology, and oceanography. Although recent efforts to determine geoscience curriculum for undergraduates in the U.S. (e.g., Fuhrman et al., 2005; Earth Science Literacy Initiative, 2010) and the European Union (e.g., Bologna Process, 2010; Boyle et al., 2009) have been an important conversations about what we teach our students, how we teach in order to engage and motivate students has been shown to be as important as choice of content (Bransford et al., 2000; Patrick et al., 2003; Brophy, 2004). Research on what motivates students to learn provides insight into why certain pedagogical practices are effective for capturing student attention and changing attitudes. For example, students who perceive course content to have less value show lower levels of motivation to learn (Wigfield and Eccles, 2002). Compelling a student to take a science course would seem to contradict his or her desire for control over the learning process and devalue what is taught. Further, research has shown the more students have a clear sense of their future goals, the less they value the content in introductory general studies courses; e.g., introductory geoscience courses (Husman et al., 2007). These findings help us understand our sense that geoscience educators in introductory courses are fighting an uphill battle from the first day of class. The purpose of this article is to develop a practical model for the multiple factors that motivate student learning, which can be used by educators to design effective learning opportunities. Perhaps the single most important factor is interest, or what psychologists call “intrinsic value.” Research shows that the best predictor of students taking a second class in a topic is not their performance in the first class, but their interest in the subject (Harackiewicz et al., 2000). Thus, our model not only incorporates what we know about enhancing student performance with learning outcomes, but also includes what we know about enhancing student interest in geoscience. A MODEL OF THE AFFECTIVE DOMAIN FOR THE GEOSCIENCES We propose a model (Fig. 1) that incorporates three aspects of the affective domain as an effective construct to Received 18 November 2009; revised 22 October 2010; accepted 29 October 2010; published online 24 May 2011. Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Electronic mail: vanderhoeven@mesacc.edu. Physical Science Department, Mesa Community College at Red Mountain, 7110 East McKellips Road, Mesa, Arizona 85207, USA Department of Geology=Astronomy, West Chester University, 750 South Church St., West Chester, Pennsylvania 19383-0001, USA School of Social and Family Dynamics, POB 873701, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-0611, USA School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, POB 871404, Tempe, Arizona 85287-1404, USA Rock Solid Testing Services, Carlsbad, California 92011, USA 1089-9995/2011/59(2)/71/14/$23.00 VC Nat. Assoc. Geosci. Teachers 71 JOURNAL OF GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION 59, 71–84 (2011)