The University of British Columbia

Questions or Goals

1. Why do upper level students have increased skill yet decreased confidence at identifying landscapes and the timescales involved in their formation?
2. This project involves development of the Landscape Identification and Formation Test (LIFT) to investigate this question.

Implementation

The plan for this B.Sc. Honors thesis project includes ...

• Interviews of experts
• Interviews of students at different levels in their geoscience programs
• Iterative selection of images with validation
• Refinement of questions based on think-aloud and expert responses & comments
• Deployment of the instrument and analysis of results.

People (contacts)

• Alison Jolley is P.I. on this project
• Sara Harris and Francis Jones are supporting this B.Sc. Honors thesis project.

Progress

• Time line and deliverables are constrained by the B.Sc. thesis schedule. See http://www.eos.ubc.ca/courses/eosc449/eosc449.htm

Products (papers, presentations, etc)

• Initial results were presented in January 2010 at the 46th annual Western Inter-University Geosciences Conference, 2010.
• The final thesis (April 2010) is entitled
  Identifying Landscapes and their Formation Timescales: Comparing Knowledge and Confidence of Beginner and Advanced Geoscience Undergraduate Students
• The final poster presentation can be seen here (6.5 mbyte PDF).

Intentions.

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