This paper describes an innovative interdisciplinary project at California State University, Long Beach, which is designed to increase the attractiveness of the geosciences to underrepresented groups. The program is called the Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Project, or   GDEP. [ Slide 2 ] This is a three year program, which began in the fall of 2001, with funding from the National Science Foundation's Opportunities to Enhance Diversity in Geosciences program. The purpose of this $852,000 project is to attract NSF-defined Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math minorities in local community colleges and high schools into the geosciences through an intensive summer research experience at California State University, Long Beach. The geosciences are defined as physical geography, geology, archaeology, and environmental science.  

[ Slide 3 ] GDEP represents a uniquely harmonious team effort among faculty investigators in the departments of Geography, Geological Sciences, and Anthropology. At CSULB these three departments are housed in two different colleges, the College of Liberal Arts (where Geography and Anthropology are based) and the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (where Geological Sciences can be found). In addition, GDEP includes a faculty member from the Department of Psychology, who serves as a program evaluator, and a staff member from the Student Access to Science and Math Center, who manages the community college and high school students brought to CSULB as GDEP interns and Foundation employees. These interns are nominated by five local community college partners and the Long Beach Unified School District. GDEP, then, requires rather elaborate institutional support and coordination in order to carry out its interdisciplinary and outreach goals. Above all, GDEP is committed to closing the gap between community demographics and the CSULB student deomographics in the three geoscience disciplines.   [ Slide 4 ] This table shows the disconnect between community and geoscience demographics that led to this effort to intervene.

[ Slide 5 ] The goals of GDEP are to increase the number of underrepresented students who have had educational and research experiences in the geosciences. GDEP is meant to establish a seamless transition of underrepresented students in local community colleges and high schools into four-year universities in general and CSULB in particular. GDEP systematically increases the visibility of geography, geology, and archaeology in local community colleges and high schools, particularly emphasizing the exciting fieldwork common in those disciplines, the many attractive jobs available in them, and the kinds of educational preparation students need to be competitive for those jobs and further studies. GDEP does this, not only through its summer student research immersion experience but through campus visits by CSULB GDEP faculty and staff. An additional goal is to increase GDEP faculty research output and involve community college and high school faculty in this research. This is meant to improve the level of geoscience education in all our classes and thereby increase the attractiveness of the geoscience majors to non-GDEP students in our courses. The hope is that underrepresented students will not only transfer to CSULB or other four year institutions but will major in one of the geosciences and retain their interest through graduation, if not graduate school.

[ Slide 6 ] Each summer, the CSULB GDEP faculty loosely define field and lab based research projects and then refine them with their community college and high school faculty collaborators. The assessor, too, runs a survey and focus group based project.   [ Slide 7 ] All faculty commit five weeks of full-time work with GDEP, distributed over the eight weeks of full-time work for which the students are paid and held responsible. All student participants must prepare poster presentations of their research and give them at a culminating on-campus student research symposium (the campus holds a symposium for a number of somewhat similar research immersion programs in various science disciplines). They are encouraged to give posters at regional science conferences as well, for which travel and registration moneys are provided from GDEP.  

[ Slide 8 ] In summer 2002, we ran seven GDEP research projects. These covered quite a diverse range, given the varied interests of the three disciplines involved. There were three geological projects focussed on local sedimentary and structural geology of both marine and terrestrial environments and a tectonic geomorphology project in Mexico. Two projects focussed on geoarchaeological prospecting in Malibu Creek State Park and on the Channel Islands, which each involved an archaeologist, a geologist, and a geographer.   [ Slide 9 ] A seventh project involved students with the ongoing chaparral fire hazard analyses of the NASA Regional Earth Science Applications Center housed in the Department of Geography. 

[ Slide 10 ] In addition to lab and field work on these seven projects, the student participants were also provided a program of on-campus workshops and off-campus tours designed to enhance their research and study skills, give them new and highly sought skills in presentation techniques and web design, ensure that they understood field and lab safety requirements, expose them to GIS, GPS, and remote sensing, and introduce them to the ethics of scientific work.

[ Slide 11 ] A very important aspect of GDEP is assessment of the degree to which it accomplishes its goals. To that end, one of the assessment projects involved establishment of a baseline of general education student perceptions of the geosciences. This entailed surveys distributed to sections of each department's basic general education science course. These surveys were administered at the beginning of each class to establish how students viewed the geosciences before having taken the introductory course and then at the end of the semester to see how the course had affected their perceptions. The survey consists of 25-30 questions to be answered along 1-5 point Likert scales ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree.   [ Slide 12 ]The first round of these ongoing surveys were conducted at CSULB during the spring of 2002, before any of the GDEP faculty had gone through the first GDEP summer. In the pre-test, three-fourths of student answers to the questions diverged significantly from a neutral answer of 3 (though rarely as much as 1 point away). Roughly half their answers indicated positive feelings towards the geosciences and a quarter were negative. The post-tests showed a slight but non-significant increase in positive perceptions.

GDEP plans to administer these surveys over the three years of the project to see if faculty participation in GDEP summer activities will affect their teaching enough to produce significant improvement in non-GDEP student perceptions of the geosciences in their classes. The surveys were, accordingly, readministered in Fall 2002, but only in geography were both pre- tests and post-tests completed.  

[ Slide 13 ] Results remain disappointing at this stage. Sixty percent of student pret-test responses diverged significantly from neutral, with positive and negative divergences roughly equal at 32% and 28%, respectively. In the post-tests, only half diverged significantly from neutral, with positive divergences down slightly to 30% and negative divergences down a bit more, to 20%. In all, student perceptions basically became overall more neutral. We hope to improve these results and are in the process of doing pre-test and post-test surveys in the classes of participating community college and high school faculty.  

[ Slide 14 ] Those students who participated in GDEP activities were the subject of more intense and more qualitative assessments. Dave Whitney conducted pre- GDEP focus groups with the 7 students who started GDEP of the 8 students originally selected. He then conducted post-GDEP focus groups with the 5 students who completed the program, and then they participated in a debriefing session with all faculty after the culminating poster session.  

[ Slide 15 ] The students strongly commended the opportunities they had to work one-on-one with faculty, graduate students, and their peers and get to know them as individuals while engaging in their research and workshops. They reported coming to an understanding of why math and physics are so often recommended or required of the sciences in general and the geosciences in particular as students worked on their own data. They were also impressed with the kinds of jobs that geographers, geologists, and archaeologists do and the good pay they earn and commented that this came as something of a surprise for them. Very tellingly, the students often remarked on how obviously factionalized the disciplines seemed at their home institutions: They were surprised at the pleasant atmosphere of cooperation among CSULB geographers, geologists, and archaeologists participating in GDEP. The students all left with a commitment to the geosciences, all but one planning to major in one of them (mostly geology this time around) and that one planning to minor. All of them now want masters and doctoral degrees, aspirations much elevated from their goal of getting bachelors or masters degrees on entering the program.

[ Slide 16 ] GDEP's first year boasts many successes. The CSULB geologists, geographers, and archaeologist succeeded in creating a collaborative community among themselves that could design multidisciplinary goals and work to get them implemented through a complicated intracampus and intercampus institutional structure. This collaborative eventually included 9 community college and high school faculty and 15 CSULB faculty, graduate students, and staff, as well as the 5 successful interns. GDEP incoporated assessment from the very beginning, not just of the GDEP projects themselves, but of the impacts that GDEP will have on large numbers of non-GDEP students in participants' classes. GDEP has already resulted in 4 presentations in geography and geology conferences, besides the 2 being presented here at the AAG. The first of the research reports themselves is being reported by Suzanne Wechsler in a 1 pm session tomorrow. GDEP maintains an active web presence where its research projects are outlined and its products are archived.  

[ Slide 17 ] GDEP has faced a number of challenges, however, which we are working to resolve for the Summer 2003 season. We have funding to support 10 GDEP interns each summer, but were only able to recruit 8 last summer, of whom only 5 stayed throughout the summer. We found that, because of the interdisciplinary tensions noted by the students, we cannot rely on approaching one faculty member at each partner institution and having them contact their colleagues in the other disciplines on campus. We are, thus, engaging, in one-on-one contacts with all faculty in the three disciplines on each campus, visiting the campuses to explain GDEP and encourage faculty to recruit for GDEP and consider participating themselves. We found that, despite an introductory meeting with student applicants and their nominees last year, a lot of the interns did not really understand that GDEP is a full-time job for 8 weeks and that field work can be quite demanding. We are remedying this by offering a one day field "boot camp" before student applicants commit to GDEP, hoping this minimizes attrition this summer.

We are continuing to expand our assessment surveys to all general education science courses we teach, both us at CSULB and those at the partner community colleges and high schools. We also would like to know more about the general student population perception of the geosciences, so we are going to institute focus groups in the general student population to get a more nuanced and qualitative sense of student perceptions of the three disciplines and personal obstacles to considering them as majors. 

[ Slide 18 ] In short, we encourage geographers in other minority-serving institutions to consider seeking out their colleagues in geology and archaeology. Research-based experiences for underrepresented groups in your own and neighboring feeder institutions are one means of increasing minority student interest in the geosciences. NSF has funds earmarked for such programs in the Geosciences Directorate. Such interaction can be terrifically rewarding, improving the contacts among disciplines, boosting your own individual research activities, as well as getting a new group of students interested in our disciplines.