The National Science Teacher Association annual conference was held Atlanta this year. I got selected to present about the inquiry-based teaching model that we started using in the second undergraduate Biology labs of the program. Dr. Gutzler and I co-taught the first inquiry-based lab where we used inquiry-based teaching methods to increase student engagement and for the students to have an authentic lab research experience.
Engagement is certainly an essential part of learning but sometimes we as educators can misunderstand it. We think that “student participation” is the same as engagement but that is not necessarily true. There are three different levels of engagement: behavioral (students doing the work and following the rules), emotional (what are their interests, values, and emotions), and cognitive (the motivation, effort, and strategy they use to learn the material). Therefore, students are engaged when they are motivated to learn because they have curiosity, interest and/or passion about a certain topic. At the end, this behavior will make it easy for them to understand the material and they will also be able to incorporate in their lives as they see the big picture of the topic.
What are the BIOL 2108 typical course objectives?
The course normally consists of a variety of pre-established experiments where students still have some freedom on their experimental design. For example: when we are talking about all the factors that may affect seed germination, they have the freedom to use different type of soils, seed, amount of water, light or no light, temperature and so on. But in many cases, there’s not much variation from semester to semester. Also, this laboratory also goes hand in hand with the lecture they take to strengthen the student’s understanding of the concepts learned in lecture.
Based on previous evaluations we found:
Some of them enjoyed an experiment more than other experiments
They’d like to have projects that run weeks instead of one experiment per week.
They find Plant Biology SUPER boring and they feel they do too much of it.
What were our objectives in changing things over to an inquiry model?
1) To increase student engagement- to accomplish this goal we wanted a lab that fosters independence and a lab that gives them ownership of their own work (topic of interest)
2) For them to have an authentic lab experience and be memorable- from the bench work down to collaborating with other students and discussing authorship
The change
We went from a pre-written instructor centered experiments to student-centered experiments.
Inquiry based model objectives
For this model we also wanted students to develop student understanding for the scientific method through inquiry-based learning (disproving hypothesis, research bias, validity of their work, starting from their own experimental questions as compared to the regular lab)
We wanted them to have an authentic lab experience that also includes collaboration from their peers and this way they can learn about authorship while they develop and perform their own experiment
Data analysis
Basic laboratory skills
To succeed in scientific writing and how to give an effective scientific presentation
Student assessment
Based on the bloom’s taxonomy model we wanted to offer assignments where they could apply, analyze, evaluate and eventually create.
Overall, the application of this model, was successful on student engagement. Based on student evaluations, students were able to share that the majority of the assignments contributed to their learning and met the overall objectives of the course. The opportunity to present this model in this conference, gave me a chance to receive constructive feedback from other education leaders. I also got the opportunity to listen to other talks which gave me some ideas to incorporate in my future courses.
This course is not being taught at the moment and it stills developing but the results of this model motivated me to teach an inquiry-based lab in my own with a different subject. I have taught it in Fall 2018 with a cancer research topic and it was also successful.
