Assessing an Undergraduate Oceanography Curriculum

Despite being a relative newcomer to the geoscience disciplines, the ocean sciences play an important role in the geosciences: the ocean controls the planets energy budget, directly drives or influences all major patterns of weather and climate, shapes the planets geologic evolution, and links the planets food and nutrient chains. Coupling the oceans fundamental importance with an excitement among students to learn about the ocean (Garrison, 2014), a rigorous and well-designed undergraduate degree program in oceanography that engages students in the inquiry-based learning process (e.g., Hassard, 2005) throughout their undergraduate careers is needed. However, the tools most often used at the undergraduate level, such as lectures, whose delivery is made relatively easy by the utility of Microsoft PowerPoint, and recipe-driven confirmatory exercises, whose outcomes are often known before the task even begins, do a poor job of promoting student retention or independent thinking (Handelsman et al, 2004; Mazur, 2008). Such activities often rate low in promoting critical thinking and can be considered to fall near the bottom of Blooms Taxonomy (Bloom et al, 1956; Anderson et al, 2001) or Webb's Depth of Knowledge (Webb, 1997, 1999). However, inquiry-driven activities, such as assigning think-pair-share questions (Kagan, 1994); asking for critique, evidence, and reasoning of a scientific claim (McNeil and Krajcik, 2008); assigning students to predict, observe, and explain a phenomena (White and Gunstone, 1992); and dispelling student misconceptions (Feller, 2007), fall much higher in critical thinking ratings.