Field-based learning opportunities tend to have positive impacts on undergraduate students and their ability to succeed in their field of study. The primary question we address is if students are able to achieve program-specific learning objectives through participation in an 8-week, field-based research program designed to introduce students to interdisciplinary research in archaeology and ecology. Through this program, student cohorts investigated questions converging on deep-time (i.e., 2,000 years in the past to present) anthropogenic influences in the Upper Mississippi River System. We report on the educational design, learning objectives, and results of three years of formative and summative assessments for this interdisciplinary, archaeology and ecology field-based research program. The learning objectives for participating students included increased scientific literacy and communication skills, critical thinking and STEM skills, and capacities in archaeological and ecological interdisciplinarity. We implemented program-developed rubrics that account for both critical thinking and STEM understanding, self-administered competency surveys, and program-developed items to measure student gains through program participation.
Results/Conclusions
For each cohort participating in the program, we found significant gains in nearly all learning objectives. Results from the formative assessment indicates that each student cohort gained self-perceived confidence in their progress to complete their final research project, in their ecological skills, and their archaeological skills over the course of the program. Students demonstrated significant gains in critical thinking as measured through our assessment rubric. Students also reported increases in their perception of their general scientific skills and discipline specific skills on the 26-item survey from the beginning to the end of the program. Additionally, students demonstrated significant gains in the 20-item content specific test from the start to end of the program and also received high percentages of the available points on the program-ending research poster presentations. The program we designed helped students gain significant increases in all five of our learning objectives. These educational outcomes and assessment tools have implications for how we design and evaluate undergraduate field-based learning programs in both archaeology and ecology and may be applied to field-based research instruction.