Doug Czajka

Haven’t updated this site since I started my new position, but first semester as a new tenure track assistant professor is finished. Mostly. I still have to give my class their exams this upcoming week. And I have to write my tenure plan and give it to committee by Friday. All in all, it has been an extremely busy semester, and I found myself having to work many weekends to stay on top of both my teaching and research projects. I feel pretty good about what I accomplished in my first semester, but hope next semester is less hectic. Having a T/TH teaching schedule should help, as the MWF schedule this semester led to a lot of Sunday prep, especially since I was writing much of the labs for the section of Intro geology lab I was teaching. I think it’ll be nice to wrap this up with a list of things I’ve accomplished or taken on this semester and end with some photos. So here we go:

• Taught two sections of Intro to Geology. While this wasn’t a new course for me, it was with a new textbook, in a new setting (it’s been awesome teaching in Utah with world class geology in a backyard, but incorporating it into my teaching took time), and a much different population of students than at NC State. One section was also a live interactive class with students (many highschoolers) at about a dozen remote sites, so that prevented some challenges. Between both sections I taught a total of 244 students.
• Taught one section of Intro to Geology lab. Challenging because the lab book activities were pretty bad (low inquiry), so I decided not to use it and write/adapt my own lab activities.
• Submitted a first author paper on work from my post-doc (with much help from my collaborators) to the Journal of College Science Teaching on new rubrics for assessing student process skills.
• Submitted a co-authored paper on the InTeGrate Teaching materials and their impact on teaching practices. Thankful that the talented geo-ed researchers on the project team allowed me to play a role in the project.
• Joined, as senior personnel, an NSF grant with colleagues to investigate a new digital assessment instrument with built in meta-cognitive tools. We’ll be testing if it improves student performance and meta-cognitive skills.
• Submitted 4 chapters of our dinosaur textbook to the publisher. Hoping to raise that number by the end of the year.
• Was elected to the Geological Society of America Geoscience Education Division Board as the new Second Vice Chair. This will be a rotating position, so over four years I’ll serve as Vice Chair, Chair, and finally Past Chair.
• Was elected/appointed to serve on the Re-envisioning Undergraduate Education, Textbook, and Faculty Office Space committees at UVU.
• Finally, I was able to explore some awesome places here in Utah that I had not previously been to, including Arches NP, Canyonlands NP, the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail and three museums. A few pictures below!

It has been a while since I’ve updated this page with a post, so this is long overdue. I’ll get the biggest update out of the way first: I’ve got a new position in a new state at a new university. My Postdoctoral Fellowship at VCU had two years of funding, but with the scarcity of DBER (Discipline Based Education Research) positions, I knew I couldn’t afford to sit a year out of the job market. The rate of tenure track geoscience education research positions posted each yearly hiring cycle seems to be one, maybe 2 if its a good year. I was fairly selective in the jobs I applied to, knowing I wanted to get out west for my next role, and the fact that I had a year of cushioning on my postdoc if I didn’t find anything. Since I didn’t need to take the ‘desperation shotgun approach’ and apply to everything I was remotely qualified for (I put in 25 applications last year); my total this year was four. Of those four, one was a TT GeoEd position at Utah Valley University. The others were all lecturer positions that interested me. Long stressful job story short, I had two campus interviews, got an offer from UVU, had to decline another really great offer, and withdrew from the other two after video interviews. I really think my postdoc experience made me much more competitive this go round, having landing interviews everywhere I applied. In the end, things worked out great and I’m happy to have landed the TT position on UVU!

I will say, I was a little sad that I was going to be leaving Richmond. It was a short year there, and I hardly got to know the city, but I loved it. I’ll surely miss the 5 minute walk to the James River and living across the street from Basic City Brewing RVA.

Before moving I did head out to Montana for another field season with Mary, Johan, and the crew from the Museum of the Rockies. This trip was short though, about a week, due to my impending move a week after returning. The first few days we did some unsuccessful prospecting, and then John, the MOR curator, made the decision to open up a quarry in the location where I found my first dino bone last summer. I was only there for the first two days of quarrying, and then we got rained out and it was time to return to Bozeman for the flight home. I hear they uncovered more bone at the site, but nothing articulated.

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Once back from Montana, it was time to start the process of moving. The original plan for moving was to rent a 12′ Penske truck, drive my stuff to Utah, and figure out how to get my car later. But, when I went to pick up the truck, they ended up giving me a 16′ truck. It was bigger than needed, but it did mean that it had a towing hitch and I could trailer my car. Hmm. Only problem was my car was in Raleigh where I was going to store it until I could get it to Utah. Rachel, my amazing girlfriend who was the only helper in this process, and I made the game day decision to pack up the truck in a hurry and race to Raleigh to get a car carrier before the Raleigh Penske closed. We had a lot of reservations and anxiety about towing a car behind a 16′ Penske truck all the way from Raleigh to Utah, but in the end, it really wasn’t that bad, and ended up being fairly cheap since they charged me for a 12′ truck. We even had so much room in the truck, that we were able to throw my mattress down and sleep in the truck one night when we camped at Firerock Canyon in Wyoming.

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I’ve now been in Utah for a little over a month getting settled in, and it is beautiful here. It’s a little nuts to be standing in the grocery store parking lot and this is your view:

I’m sure I’ll be numb to it eventually, but for now it’s pretty awesome. I’ve done a couple local hikes, including Mahogany Mtn North Summit and Lake Blanche. It was pretty cool to see the impressive glacial striations on the rocks around Lake Blanche. Also cool that I my students can easily go see these features that they learn about when we cover Alfred Wegener in class this week ( he used evidence of glaciation to support his continental drift hypothesis). The world class geology in this state will certainly make teaching fun, and hopefully very relevant for the students.

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I’m about a month behind in getting this news out here, but here it is. Last month a paper that some colleagues and I published in the Journal of Geoscience Education (JGE) was selected to receive the 2018 Outstanding Paper Award. The paper in question was titled “Instructional Utility and Learning Efficacy of Common Active Learning Strategies.”  Our intention with the paper was to review many of the teaching strategies that are commonly used in an active learning classroom and devise a rubric that would allow us to assess them in terms of their utility and the evidence to support their efficacy in promoting student learning. The latter was accomplished through a literature review and based on the strength of reported studies in isolating the strategy and assessing it’s effectiveness. To determine utility, we used our experience as teachers and education researchers to create a list of categories and criteria that impact the ease of use or utility of a specific strategy. These criteria included things like prep time, assessment ease, class time required, and availability of examples. Based on our nine criteria and resulting rubric, we were able to give each strategy a utility score.

Our hope with writing this paper was that instructors could this as a guide to instructional change in their classrooms. If they are just starting to implement active learning, they could find strategies with high utility and began to incorporate those as a first step. High utility strategies like peer instruction and think-pair-shair require minimal prep time and resources, are easy for students to use, promote interation, and can be used often and in large classes. Instructors who are already using such high utility strategies could use the paper to get more information on more involved strategies that they may be looking to incorporate into their courses. Strategies like teaching with models or jigsaw activities take more prep time and often require more class time, but many of them have research validating the value of their use in promoting student learning.

If you are interested in reading the paper, click on the journal cover below. It is also linked on my Publications page. And you can find more about the JGE awards on the National Association of Geoscience Teachers page.

Update: Here’s a picture of all the authors receiving an award plaque from editor-in-chief Anne Egger at the NAGT luncheon during the Geological Society of America annual Meeting in Indianapolis.

Field work has been tiring, which has kept me from providing updates. Today was the last day in the field for the NC State Crew, and we head back to Bozeman tomorrow. It really has been quite exciting and a lot of fun, so I’ll recap the past few days.

Tuesday

On Tuesday we split into two groups to continue prospecting some new areas in the Judith River Formation. I joined Mary, Ellen and Kaitlyn to hit up some exposures West of the Rock Creek which ran through the middle of the field area.

While we didn’t find much other than some scraps of eroded bone, it was a rather enjoyable day of hiking through the Montana badlands.

Wednesday

On Wednesday we also split into two groups, but this time one group went to go prospecting in the Bear Paw shale for marine vertebrates. I stayed with the Judith River group to continue looking for dinosaurs west of the Rock Creek. We spent all morning prospecting and still didn’t find much. Again, the hiking and views really dull the disappointment of non-discovery.

In the afternoon, we decided to head back over to the site that Mary found under the sandstone ledge and see if we could excavate some of the fossils in the underlying sandstone. We managed to get out a broken theropod tooth and Elena and I worked to uncover a rather large hadrosaur leg bone.

While the Judith River group didn’t have much luck finding anything, Johan with the Bearpaw group did find some bones that belonged to a plesiosaur, but got rained out before they were able to excavate too much.

Thursday

Thursday was another two group day. I headed west with Bob, Mary, Kaitlyn and Elena to prospect some land closer to Malta and to visit some old sites of Mary’s. It was another day of not finding much and we ended up getting a bit of rain in the afternoon. We also used this opportunity to hit up downtown Malta and get Elena some new shoes, as she suffered some massive boot blowouts on the first day in the field. She did a pretty impressive duct tape reconstruction that lasted through two days of hiking in the field. Impressive.

Friday

The forecast for Friday was rain all day, so we made no plans to go out into the field. Instead we decided to head to the Fort Peck Dam and Interpretive Center. I really enjoyed reading about the history and engineering of the dam, and the museum had a really great mount of a tryannosaur and a hadrosaur.

While sitting out the rain in the afternoon, the NC State crew got a little restless, so we decided to head into the great metropolis of Saco, Montana, population 197. We hit up the Old Brand Saloon for some beers among the locals.

Saturday

On Saturday the whole crew (minus Johan who had to return to Bozeman) headed to the Bearpaw Shale site to continue excavation on the plesiosaur.

As we continued to take the quarry deeper into the hillside, we began to uncover some amazing bones including a beautiful rib, a lower jaw with an intact tooth, and eventually a larger skull. What we were unearthing was a relatively complete mosasaur! It was actually quite a surreal experience to be uncovering such a large beast from the sediment it came to rest in 76 million years ago. Quite different from seeing them prepared and in a museum, at least for this geologist.

Sunday

While half the crew did some mapping and jacketing at the mosasaur quarry, Mary, Kaitlyn and I did about an hour of prospecting in the Bearpaw shale. After that, we headed with Bob back to the Judith River Formation to jacket and recover some of the bones we found earlier. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a whole lot done before it started to rain then hail, which was quite uncomfortable since the temperature dropped about 15 degrees to go with the wet hail. We headed back to the cabin shortly after as the weather was not going to cooperate with us trying to recover our dino bones.

We headed back to camp and are ended our last day of field work by watching Jurassic World on TV, which seems extra fitting considering our big find.

I’ve had a blast over the last week prospecting and excavating with both the NCSU and MOR crews, and cannot thank Mary enough for inviting me out. I hope I get the chance to get back out here again soon.

So long Montana!

I’m still in Montana hunting for dinosaurs, but as we are delayed by rain this morning I thought I’d take a moment to post about the first published paper to come out of my dissertation work. This paper describes a study conducted over 4 semesters in which I pre-post tested geology students on concepts related to geologic time and rates in a variety of courses including Physical Geology, Historical Geology, Structural, Geomorphology, and Geology Field Camp. I was interested in seeing how students conceptions related to ideas of geologic time and rates vary at different times in their academic journey as geology students.

I won’t spoil the ending, but if you’re curious to read more about the work, The abstract is below or you can head to the Journal of Geoscience Education for the full article.

ABSTRACT
Past research has evaluated how pre-service teachers, high school students, and introductory college students conceptualize geologic or deep time. The ability to think on geologic timescales is regarded as an important skill in the study of geology, yet little work has specifically addressed how student understanding of this concept evolves during the undergraduate experience and beyond. We describe an exploratory, pre-experimental study conducted at a large research university investigating student knowledge of various Earth history and geologic time concepts among geology majors. A 21-question pre/posttest was constructed to assess concepts related to landscape identification, landscape formation rates, Earth history, the geologic timescale, and relative and absolute dating. Pre/posttesting was conducted across four semesters within a variety of courses including historical geology, structural geology, geomorphology, and a geology field camp course. Data were also collected from a group of nonmajors in an introductory physical geology course to obtain a novice score and from a group of faculty expert geoscientists at the Geological Society of America annual meeting to obtain an expert score on the instrument. Additionally, interviews were conducted with 11 senior geology majors to gain a deeper understanding of their conceptions related to a sample of the concepts assessed. Results show that students make the largest gains after taking physical and historical geology courses, but no significant changes were seen in upper-level geology courses. Many geology students lacked familiarity with the geologic timescale and had difficulty estimating formation rates of landscapes formed on intermediate timespans.

Today was our first day of prospecting on private land we had permission to search for dinosaurs. The entire landscape in our field area lies within the Judith River Formation, a ~75 million year old Cretaceous unit consisting of interbedded coastal, fluvial, and floodplain deposits. During the Cretaceous, the interior US was covered by a shallow interior sea, and the deposits in the Judith River are nearshore or river environments that were flowing into the sea from the mountains to the west. Dead dinosaurs could be preserved by rapid burial in these river or floodplain environments, and that’s what we were here to find.

We split into group of three, and I started out the day with Mary and Johan. We head first to a site that they have visited previously, and Johan preceded to find a some bone fragments and a couple theropod teeth. I really needed to orient myself geologically and stratigraphically however, and split off from Mary and Johan to walk the section.

When I got back to Mary and Johan, Mary had found a lot of bone underneath a massive block of sandstone, including a tooth possibly still embedded in a jaw. While exciting, the overlying sandstone block made excavation of this bone highly unlikely.

After a short lunch, we decided to head walk toward another previously visited site. We headed down to retrieve our bags from where we had left them in the morning, near the site where Johan had found his teeth. As we were gearing up to hike towards the next spot, I spotted a piece of bone resting in the weathered sandstone. This spot had a lot bone fragments that had weathered out, so it was not unusual, but for some reason I decided to excavate into the weathered sandstone a bit.

As I continued to clear, we realized the bone was rather large and continued into the saprolite a ways. Mary, Scott and I continued to excavate and get the bone fully exposed. No one was quite sure what dinosaur it was from, or even what bone it was (possibly a pelvic bone).

I think the plan is to plaster it up so that it can be taken into the museum lab for further prep.

Once finished with my bone we walked to the previous site so we could plaster jacket and remove a large bone found last year that Mary and Elena are going to use for molecular research. Finished with that, we made the long walk back to the vehicles and left the field shortly after 6pm, exhausted from the tiring, but exciting first day out.

 

 

Before starting my new postdoc position at VCU, I have decided to join Mary Schweitzer and a crew from the Museum of the Rockies (MOR) for ten days of prospecting for dinosaurs in Montana. Eight year old Doug is absolutely thrilled with this decision (and let’s be honest, so is adult Doug). This adventure started yesterday, with an uneventful day of flying from RDU to BZN, and meeting up with Mary, her postdoc Elena, undergrad student Kaitlyn and colleague Johan. We all crashed in Bozeman for the night, eager for the journey and the adventure to follow.

We woke up early to pack up and grab breakfast before heading to MOR to meet the rest of the team. I of course had to get a picture with Big Mike before we headed off into the middle of nowhere, Montana.

After meeting the crew from MOR consisting of Bob, Scott, Richard, and Ellen, we headed out on the six hour journey northeast into the Hi-line region of Montana aiming for Malta where we would shop for supplies before heading into camp. The drive through Big Timber, the Judith Gap, Lewistown and countless other small towns was beautiful, with a lot of great views of the pimple-like, uplifted mountain ranges that dot west central Montana (such as the Crazies and the Little Rockies). Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures because I was driving.In Malta, we had to stop in at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum to see the Jurassic World-esque dinosaurs outside and the lovely fossils inside.

After the short museum visit, we headed to the cabin we would be staying at which was another hour outside of Malta. The map below gives you an idea of the remoteness of this place.

Mary had warned me about the mosquitoes, and once we arrived, they did not disappoint. They would hover in a cloud outside of the car just begging you to get out. Which we unfortunately had to. The only other time I’ve seen mosquitoes so rabid was at Oregon inlet in NC, where they forced me to eat a leftover donut for dinner inside my tent rather than get out and cook a real meal.

We ended the day by taking a drive down one of the county roads near some of the land we will be prospecting on. I’ll leave you with the lovely picture of a rainbow over the range land of eastern Montana. Tomorrow the real fun begins…hopefully.

Welcome to my new little corner of the web. While this page will house much of my personal academic info, I hope to use the homepage to maintain a relatively active blog detailing more interesting things, such as my travels, interesting new research in geology and geo education, and whatever else I feel like writing about. It should get off to an exciting start, as in a week I will be heading to Montana for ten days of dinosaur prospecting with NCSU paleontologist Mary Schweitzer. I’m super excited for the trip and plan to post plenty of pictures and words here, so stay tuned!