A great deal of discussion has occurred in recent years about the value of inquiry-based approaches to teaching ecology labs. Structuring laboratory and field exercises around the methodology of science, rather than around technology or a particular knowledge base, provides students with a more exciting and realistic science experience. Many examples of inquiry-based curricula are available, and are regularly reported in this newsletter and such journals as BioScience and The Journal of College Science Teaching.
What I describe here is the successful implementation of an inquiry-based lab experience in an environmental biology course that focuses on ecology and conservation biology. What makes this curriculum different is that the lab is linked with an upper-level course on science education that provides a workshop experience for prospective K-12 science teachers. I developed this model in order to achieve 3 goals: (1) provide beginning students exposure to science methodology (a goal familiar to those who have promoted inquiry-based curricula), (2) teach future science teachers how to teach science methodology in an inquiry-based setting, and (3) validate a student's own curiosity about how nature works and demonstrate that the scientific method is a powerful way to satisfy that curiosity.
The model involves two interrelated courses: one on science education and one on environmental biology. Students in the science education course are juniors and seniors with previous field biology coursework and an interest in science education as a career. They spend four weeks (of a 13-week semester) reviewing the details of science methodology, experimental design, data analysis (including statistics), library research, and written and oral communication, with particular regard to how to teach these concepts to others. During the remainder of the semester, they serve as the instructors for teams of research students enrolled in an introductory-level environmental biology course. The students in the introductory course are all freshmen or sophomores and have had little previous college-level science. The lab portion of this course requires each student to work in a team of three to five students, under the supervision of an instructor from the science education course, to develop and carry out a research project of their own choosing. The only restrictions placed on the students are that their projects must relate to the topic of the course and their questions must be answerable within the time available. All questions and research designs come from the students themselves, with guidance and encouragement from the instructors. Students may seek advice from outside experts, but they do not receive any general instruction from faculty. The students' work culminates with submission of a written research report and an oral presentation of their results in a symposium with all other research groups.
Questions that have been investigated in the past have been diverse and challenging. How does the local sewage treatment plant affect diversity of stream macroinvertebrates? How does old-growth forest differ from second-growth forest? Does clearcutting negatively affect amphibian diversity? How do acid rain and road salt impact plant growth? Because these are questions that the students developed themselves, rather than given to them by someone else, they are therefore likely to be of greater interest to the students in the group.
Although this curricular model is not restricted to any one discipline, I think it is particularly applicable to the ecological sciences. Students are usually more curious about things they can see or have directly experienced, field biology lends itself to a wide array of possible questions and investigations, and ecology tends to be less technologically-dependent than other disciplines. Similarly, using ecology as the domain for training science teachers is ideal because it is widely recognized that ecological and environmental education needs to be introduced into the classroom at an earlier age than has commonly been the case.
In my opinion, this model has been quite successful. Responses both to the inquiry-based, student-directed research experience and the science education workshop have been uniformly positive. I plan to conduct a long-term assessment of this model in five years (e.g., are the students who took this lab more or less likely than other students to develop an appreciation for science, take other science courses, or continue in science as a career), but for now I am convinced that this approach achieves the multiple goals I established at the start.
More detailed information about this curricular model can be obtained
from the Middlebury College Gopher server (gopher.middlebury.edu) in the
folder
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