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Terrible lab manual, February 23, 2007

This user-friendly, best-selling lab manual examines the basic processes of geology and their applications to everyday life. Featuring contributions from over 170 highly regarded geologists and geoscience educators, along with an exceptional illustration program by Dennis Tasa, Laboratory Manual in Physical Geology, Ninth Edition offers a new activities-based approach that gives you a more complete learning experience in the lab.
I inherited this lab manual when I started teaching physical geology this semester, and I told my students to return it to the bookstore. It contains factual errors (such as referring to hornblende and other non-metallic minerals as metallic, which they are not - metallic minerals are opaque in thin section), and the pedagogy is highly questionable. In the rock and mineral sections, it relies too heavily on photographs. Students already have a tendency to want to simply match minerals and rocks to pictures, which doesn't work, and this book encourages this. The book is too much talk and not enough action. Students in a lab should be guided to work with objects, not to simply answer questions out of a book. There is too much explanation provided, with little left for students to figure out on their own. Labs should be presented to students as mysteries to be solved, and this book takes all the mystery out of everything.

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I inherited this lab manual when I started teaching physical geology this semester, and I told my students to return it to the bookstore. It contains factual errors (such as referring to hornblende and other non-metallic minerals as metallic, which they are not - metallic minerals are opaque in thin section), and the pedagogy is highly questionable. In the rock and mineral sections, it relies too heavily on photographs. Students already have a tendency to want to simply match minerals and rocks to pictures, which doesn't work, and this book encourages this. The book is too much talk and not enough action. Students in a lab should be guided to work with objects, not to simply answer questions out of a book. There is too much explanation provided, with little left for students to figure out on their own. Labs should be presented to students as mysteries to be solved, and this book takes all the mystery out of everything.
4
This "lab manual" is VERY thick and far too wordy. Really, it's more of a spiral-bound textbook than a lab manual. Additionally, the lab questions appear in list format at the end of each section, so there is virtually no standardized answersheet for students to record their work on. That not only makes it harder on the students, but efficient grading is nearly impossible unless the instructor makes his/her own taylor-made answer sheets for the students to use on EACH lab. As if that weren't bad enough, the lab manual's companion web site is horrid. I am amazed that the AGI and the NAGT produced this lab manual.
3
I bought this book for my Geol 110 class at the University of Maryland in College Park. It's completely unlike every other lab manual I've used in college. It does not directly relate to the lab project, its more like a textbook or information packet to prepare you for the concepts you'll cover in lab. It has glossy pages instead of the usual paper so I'm discouraged from writing notes and lab findings in it. I feel like we probably could have gotten this information out of our normal textbook rather than buying a separate lab manual.
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