Zen of Venn Revisited: Inquiry and Interdisciplinary Education

Journal of Geoscience Education, May 2006 by Berkman, Paul A

ABSTRACT

Courseware to teach about the interdisciplinary nature of the Earth system was constructed based on the concept of intersecting spheres, as illustrated by Venn diagrams. This inquiry-driven courseware, which was called the Zen of Venn©, was applied in an undergraduate capstone course at The Ohio State University over two years. Results from these applications reveal that individuals integrate between 2 and 3 topics at a time, which appears to be related to the fact that the complexity of integration increases geometrically relative to the number of intersecting spheres. An area for future research would be to test whether integrating 3 plus or minus 1 topics is a generalized cognitive limitation like memorizing "7 plus or minus 2 random items." These data and observations imply that interdisciplinary courses or textbooks with many distinct topics are geared more toward memorizing than synthesizing. Consequently, to facilitate individualized discovery of knowledge (which is gained by establishing relationships between things that are known and unknown), interdisciplinary teaching materials should be designed in a manner that stimulates open-ended inquiry and integration with embedded sets of 4 or less topics.

INTRODUCTION

The Earth system is commonly considered in terms of "spheres" (Earth System Science Committee 1988, AGU 1997). Spheres represent disciplinary perspectives of the Earth system such as the geosphere, biosphere or chemosphere. Spheres also represent the Earth's spatial dimensions from the asthenosphere and lithosphere outward through the atmosphere. There even is the anthrosphere to account for the components of the Earth system that have been made or modified by humans. Using the concept of intersecting spheres, the purpose of this note is to assess how interdisciplinary relationships can be constructed to enhance Earth system science education in primary school through university levels.

ZEN OF VENN© SOFTWARE

The Venn diagram is among the most widely utilized approaches for integrating information in educational settings. In the United States, for example, Venn diagrams have been broadly incorporated into both K-12 curricula and standards for the purposes of comparing and contrasting diverse information (e.g., http://intranet.cps.kl2.il.us/, http://www.ade.state.az.us/). The power of the Venn diagram, which was introduced in the late 19th century by John Venn (Venn 1880,1881), is that logical relationships can be simply illustrated by sets of circles (Figure 1). The Venn diagram also provides a powerful tool for framing questions (Berkman 1997a,b). In particular, with overlapping circles, the areas of intersection beg the question: "what are the relationships?"

Building on the relational and inquiry utilities of Venn diagrams, software was designed and implemented to help students integrate interdisciplinary concepts. This courseware - which emerged from the Antarctic Science and Policy: Interdisciplinary Education (ASPIRE) project that was funded by the National Science Foundation (Berkman 1997c) - was called the Zen of Venn©.

The Zen of Venn© courseware was applied during the spring quarters in 1999 and 2000 in an interdisciplinary course on Antarctic science and policy at The Ohio State University. This course, which has been continuously taught in universities around the United States since 1982, involved more than 800 students from more than 90 majors in 14 colleges at The Ohio State University from 1991 through 2003 (Berkman 1997c, 2002).

The Zen of Venn© course application enabled students to integrate 2,3 or 4 topics (Figure 2). Selection of the topics was student-defined, but within the general scope or Earth system science (Berkman 2002) for this particular application. Based on the number of topics, the courseware generated diagrams with 1, 4 or 9 intersections that the students also needed to describe. After 'filling in the blanks' for their topics and intersections, the students' responses automatically were logged for subsequent analysis.

Venn diagrams were constructed by the students each week to reinforce the course content and promote independent thinking about the interdisciplinary dimensions of the Earth system. Information supplied by the students also generated a gallery of Venn-diagrams that they discussed weekly in class.

This classroom freedom to explore relationships among phenomena, entities and events in the Earth system was designed to facilitate open-ended knowledge discovery and interdisciplinary synthesis for each student individually. In addition to the classroom applications, the Zen of Venn© courseware provided the context and content for a masters thesis (Bauer 2000).

GEOMETRY OF INTEGRATION

Data logs from the Zen of Venn© applications reveal that number of topics that students integrated in the 1999 and 2000 classes were 2.77 ± 0.04 and 2.61 ± 0.03 topics, respectively (Figure 3). Among the 168 responses in 1999 there was no significant change in the average number of topics integrated over the course period. In 2000, among the 429 responses, there was a slight but significant increase in the number of topics integrated over time, which may indicate increased familiarity with the courseware or increased capacity to interpret relationships among topics. Considered together, however, there was no significant difference between the average number of topics that the students integrated with the Zen of Venn© courseware in 1999 and 2000.