Engaging First-Year Students in Team-Oriented Research: The Terrascope Learning Community

Abstract

Terrascope is a learning community for freshmen (first-year students) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that incorporates Earth system and environmental education into a problem-based, student-centered, team-oriented series of classes. In the fall semester, in the program’s core class, students are given a complex, “unsolvable” problem that they must propose solutions for as a group; deliverables include a comprehensive website and a defense of the solution before a panel of experts and the general public. In the spring, options include (a) a class in which students work in small groups on specific aspects of the solution, under the guidance of faculty; (b) a class in which students create a radio program, for general audiences, about the year’s topic; and (c) a field experience in which students come to understand the complexity of the problem on the ground, as well as the perspectives of people who would be directly affected by their proposed solution. A fundamental principle of the program is that despite being freshmen, students are treated as researchers, scientists, and engineers, who will take charge of their own learning process and will assume ownership of the problem and related tasks. Terrascope classes involve a minimum of structure and relatively few traditional teaching elements (e.g., lectures, problem sets, exams); students are provided with multiple resources (e.g., mentors, library liaisons, undergraduate teaching fellows) but are not told how best to make use of those resources. Students who have been through the program tend to have strongly developed leadership, project-management, and teamwork skills, and they credit Terrascope with being a formative part of their MIT experience and with shaping their approach to academics and employment. Our approach is scalable, one could accomplish a great deal with classes as short as a week.