My overall plan is to interview a junior or senior student who is majoring in Soil Science. I would like to see the students understanding of how soil forms.
1. How is soil formed? Give me a general description. Think about how soil develop and what is needed for it to form
2. Do soil forming factors come into play?
3. How many soil forming factors are there?
4. Are there five of them?
5. Can you list them? (Let’s write them down. Put on white board).
6. Can you describe what each process does?
7. Is each one of the soil forming processes important or are some of them non-relevant? Explain.
8. Can you have one soil forming factor without the other or are they interconnected?
9. How is soil influenced from these 5 soil forming factors?
Very interesting topic! I like how your questions build on one another. Good idea! What are you going to do if they don't know how many soil forming factors there are? Are you going to give that to them so you can move on or do you just stop there? Or is there some way to keep going without the proper number of factors? What if they can't describe the process of each one? How much is appropriate to give them in order to delve further? (Maybe I'm asking this for myself because I'm not sure what to do if my student gets stuck on the first question..)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I really like your set of questions and the way they are ordered.
This is a good topic from your discipline; I had a student select it last time I taught. Remember that the purpose of the interviews is not to verify that they know facts, but rather to uncover the student's conceptual understanding. How do they relate key ideas together? Questions 2-5 are probing facts, and are unlikely to solicit more than one work or short sentence responses. I think you take the essence of questions 8 and 9 and rework them into a context rich problem that you ask the interviewee to answer. I don't know the content well, but perhaps something along the lines of giving them some information about 2-3 different conditions under which soil would form, and then ask them to explain which one would form more fertile soil? That would inadvertently show you how they weigh the different factors and which ones they think are important or non-relevant.
ReplyDeleteYes, you can also ask them about outcomes that might arise from having all, 4, 3... etc soil forming factors. Perhaps you can start off with a tangible example. You might be able to have some samples of soils that vary in fertility and ask them what factors may or may not have been present in the formation of your soil samples. This way you could determine whether they just know the knowledge or if they can actually visually identify normal or abnormal soil formation?
ReplyDelete