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Thinking About the Process of Scientific Inquiry — Jen Roberts

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Background

My motivation for developing this course stemmed from my experiences preparing seniors and first year graduate students for graduate study. I observed that students often lack skills in applying the scientific method, as well as overall experience analyzing real data sets. Unlike many subdisciplines in geology, my research program in geomicrobiology relies heavily on experimental research. This field is relatively new, with few textbooks, and is moreover interdisciplinary, drawing from biology, geology, chemistry, and engineering. Therefore, I decided to focus my geomicrobiology course on scientific inquiry in order to introduce students to a rigorous means of utilizing the scientific method.

I based the course on a novel experiment in a specific area of geomicrobiology and taught the course in parallel with a colleague at Allegheny College. Co-teaching in this way allowed us to stress the importance of scientific collaboration on a number of levels. Each class ran separate, but related, experiments, which required interdependence and cooperation among class members and resulted in active learning and teaching by students. We also introduced students to the culture of scientific peer review by having them present and defend their experimental results to their colleagues at the other institution. Overall, the exercise was intended to promote scientific curiosity and rigor, while giving students a sense of ownership in the data they produced.

| Implementation

Implementation

Students actively participated in the course by conducting scientific research. As such, students were asked to do the following activities:

Develop a proposal for experimental design based on a given research question and hypothesis.
Design and conduct laboratory batch reactor experiments as a class.
Gain specific skills necessary to collect data from the designed experiment.
Compile and interpret data.
Give a presentation and defend design and data interpretations.
Evaluate original design in light of data collected and propose and defend an improved approach.
Make temporal predictions of the outcome of course experiment if it were allowed to run for a longer period of time.

Lectures and laboratories were used to introduce basic knowledge and skills needed to perform the above activities. Additionally, in-class exercises and discussion using real data and primary literature were used to engage students in specific aspects of scientific discovery, such as hypothesis testing and complex experimental systems.

| Student Performance

Student Performance

Students showed impressive progress in intellectual development, particularly with regard to hypothesis testing, as assessed through proposal writing. All students took responsibility for data collection and most were capable of making astute interpretations by the end of the course. However, students’ absolute grasp of newly introduced topical knowledge varied and, in most cases, this information was not completely mastered. Students also rated their own learning in the course and all students reported improvement in all aspects of the course.

| Reflections

Reflections

Overall, this approach was highly effective in engaging students in original research and acquainting them with a more rigorous use of the scientific method. This course could be easily tailored to other disciplines because its basic premise, the scientific method, is universal to all fields of science and, in some cases, engineering. A unique component of this class was the heavy emphasis on group work combined with the fact that it was co-taught at two different universities. While group work was a valuable part of the process and realistic to the professional and academic environments, in the future I will need to maintain a manageable group size to achieve maximum student involvement and ensure active learning. Also, I will need to dedicate more time to laboratory skills so that students have ample time to acquire lab skills and assign grading credit that reflects the time and effort students put forth.

My personal interactions with students beyond the course suggest a greater retention of basic skills, such as proposal writing, and even more encouraging, a scientific curiosity and creativity that the students are applying to their personal research projects. After completing the course, students exhibit a greater level of confidence in performing research, and this contributes positively to their ability to embark on independent research, particularly at the graduate level.

| Summary

Project Summary

A geology professor focuses her geomicrobiology course on scientific inquiry to introduce students to a rigorous means of using the scientific method.

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