Louise Longridge

Science Education Research Interests

Student Learning

My current research interests are focused on how to improve student learning. How do people learn best? What strategies can I use to help my students enjoy their studies, while effectively meeting course learning goals and objectives? What will students remember from a course in six months time? Most recently I have been part of a team working on how best to adapt hands-on, active learning strategies used in face-to-face settings, into a distance education environment.

Universal Design for Learning - Accessibility and Inclusion

Another special interest of mine is how to implement best practices in Universal Design for Learning, including Accessibility and Inclusion, into my teaching. I have been part of different teams working on projects with this in mind including the following:

1. Clarity in Course Syllabus - Using feedback from several thousand students, we create a simple Syllabus that students can understand and follow. This work was pre-covid. Many instructors were struggling with how to remove this barrier for students a lot in those days it seems!
2. Land Acknowledgements for Geographic or Paleontological Areas of Interest - My usual courses include recordings where I discuss different areas where I have done past fieldwork. Additional areas are also spotlighted in recordings about sites of remarkable fossil collections or recognized geological features made by others. In these acknowledgements, we formally recognize and provide some of the history around the First Nation on who’s land we are working, as well as an optional opportunity to learn more.
3. Digital 3-Dimensional Fossil and Rock Samples For Online Labs - As part of a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund Project, we created three-dimensional models of some fossil and rock samples that students can digitally manipulate in any orientation. The idea with these models is that they replicate what it would be like in a lab setting if students actually had the sample in their hand as much as possible. Please click here if you would like to learn more about this project.
4. Multiple Means of Engagement When Teaching Complex Concepts- Some people are visual learners whereas others prefer text. For more complex concepts in my usual courses, I offer both a recorded lecture option where I actively explain the concept and also a descriptive option that includes only text and figures. Both options include the chance for students to test their understanding by applying the concept in some active questions.

5. Alternative Text and Extended Caption Figures in Online Courses - In the summer of 2025 I had the chance to be part of the UDL Fellows Program in a joint project with Sarah Bean Sherman. (Lots of other people helped too along the way!) Our project was to create alternative text for all the course figures in my first year course. In total this includes roughly 860 figures. These alt text components are meant for reading by the Canvas Immersive Reader and specifically describe what is actually showing in each figure. For example, the alt text for a figure might say 'This is a picture of rock layers in a cliff.' The purpose of this is to support visually impaired learners. 

   As part of the same project, our team created optional extended figure captions for all the complex figures in the course using specific html code. These optional captions are in addition to the regular caption for each image. Specifically, students can click a dropdown button and a longer caption appears that pinpoints the specific area they should be focusing on or the immediate concept they should be taking away from each figure. Please click here if you would like to learn more about this project!

Paleontological Research Interests

Biostratigraphy

The recovery of the ammonites during the Early Jurassic, after the near demise of the group in the end-Triassic mass extinction, represents one of the most spectacular but poorly understood adaptive radiations in the fossil record. The terranes of British Columbia contain a rich and diverse earliest Jurassic ammonoid fauna and I have been involved in extensive field and laboratory work unraveling their systematics and taxonomy. This work has the potential to improve the accuracy of the geological time scale, as some of the relevant geological sections contain ash beds that provide useful radiometric dates interbedded with fossiliferous rock. Improving knowledge of the ammonite faunas and updating the North American Zonation provides a method to correlate sections constrained by absolute dates with those in other areas of the world where this is not possible. This character was also one of the main reasons behind our proposing a specific section in Haida Gwaii as a potential section to help define the base of the Jurassic system.

Paleobiogeography

Many of the terranes that make up western British Columbia were allochthonous to the craton in the Early Jurassic. Details of the geographic position of some of these terranes are still uncertain during this interval, particularly with respect to longitude. Fossil faunas provide one of best methods of narrowing down their locations. The ammonite faunas I am involved with suggest some longitudinal separation between the BC craton and the Cadwallader, Wrangellia and Peninsular terranes during the earliest Jurassic. There is also some evidence that the 'Hispanic Corridor', linking the eastern Pacific and the western Tethys Oceans, may have opened as early as the first stage in the Jurassic.

Extinction events

We are currently embroiled in a mass extinction event of our own making. In light of this, one of the most interesting questions facing humanity today is the uncertainty around what is going to happen to Earth's biota. What will the dynamics of extinction look like and what will recovery entail? One way to examine these questions is to study what has happened during past mass extinction events. With this in mind, I am involved in examining how ammonoid morphology changed around the end-Triassic mass extinction interval. Ultimately, only one ammonite group survived the extinction and acted as the rootstock for the remarkable adaptive radiation that followed. However, many questions remain. Did ammonoid morphospace shrink or change leading up to the extinction event or was it unaffected until the very latest Triassic? How quickly did ammonites recolonize potential morphospace following the extinction event? Did shell shapes that were more efficient for swimming reappear more quickly?

Paleobiology

Gleaning biological information from 200 million-year-old fossils can be difficult. Yet, this is what we must do in order to fully understand the complexities of evolution and the different steps that have led us to the biota we find today. With respect to this, Early Jurassic ammonites have some very interesting biological characteristics. A few of the taxa from the BC terranes have revealed some of the earliest definitive sexual dimorphism in the group. In addition, many of the earliest Jurassic ammonites share the unusual characteristic of having asymmetric internal components within the chambered portion of their shell. These asymmetries probably arose from stress caused by poor environmental conditions following the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic. I am involved with designing new methods of computer modeling to examine the possibility that these asymmetric elements were counterbalancing each other, allowing the animal to remain vertical when moving through the water. This work highlights how environmental stress can alter the phenotype of an animal, providing insight into the degrees of freedom present in the course of evolution.