170-1 Building Quantitative Skills In an Oceanography Course at UNC-Pembroke

Session: Quantitative and Data Analysis Skills in Geoscience Education: Supporting Student, Course, and Program Outcomes, Part I

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Abstract:

Students at UNC-Pembroke need practice in quantitative and data analysis skills. My Oceanography course is mostly hands-on activities with a large proportion involving quantitative and graphical opportunities. Most students in the course are sophomore or higher geoscience and science education majors. I have found it useful to start with an “Introduction to Math and Science” to provide a base on scientific notation, latitude/longitude, Pythagorean Theorem, and basic trig functions. Some students find these basic concepts challenging.

I use data labs from the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) to introduce students to basic oceanographic concepts and interpretation of graphs. A later OOI lab has students investigate graphs to see salinity changes with depth at multiple places throughout the year. The course contains quantitative analyses of chemical residence time, Coriolis acceleration (with an application to cars driving locally), calculation of shallow and deep wave velocities with graphing, the Bay of Fundy as a seiche, graphing tides, and analysis of coastal change and beach replenishment. Most of this is not complicated mathematics but does require computation and graph construction and interpretation. The key activity is an inquiry activity using a tsunami to measure the depth of the ocean (that I have contributed to Teach The Earth). This activity has the most complicated mathematics in the whole course, such as it is, namely algebraic re-arrangement of an equation.

Student performance depends on the student, of course, but there are some common issues:

1) not keeping track of what units are required in equations (e.g., if the shallow wave equation requires depth in meters because the equation uses square root and the student has this dimension in kilometers, then plugging kilometers into the equation will produce a wrong answer).

2) inexperience in making graphs is a bottleneck and then interpreting what a graph means is a problem.

3) not having an idea of the approximate right answer so that they write down the result of their calculation even if it is absurd (e.g., in the tsunami activity, getting the average depth of the Pacific Ocean as 30 m)

Students generally improve their quantitative skills and some find it enlightening to see how math can be used in a practical way, unlike their math classes.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

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