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STEM undergraduate instructors teaching remote courses often use traditional lecture-based instruction, despite evidence that active learning methods improve student engagement and learning outcomes. One simple way to use active learning online is to incorporate exploratory learning. In exploratory learning, students explore a novel activity (e.g., problem solving) before a lecture on the underlying concepts and procedures. This method has been shown to improve learning outcomes during in-person courses, without requiring the entire course to be restructured. The current study examined whether the benefits of exploratory learning extend to a remote undergraduate physics lesson, taught synchronously online. Undergraduate physics students (N = 78) completed a physics problem-solving activity either before instruction (explore-first condition) or after (instruct-first condition). Students then completed a learning assessment of the problem-solving procedures and underlying concepts. Despite lower accuracy on the learning activity, students in the explore-first condition demonstrated better understanding on the assessment, compared to students in the instruct-first condition. This finding suggests that exploratory learning can serve as productive failure in online courses, challenging students but improving learning, compared to the more widely-used lecture-then-practice method.
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Snail Races: An Inquiry-Based Approach to Learn Invasive Species Ecology
Inquiry-based lessons allow learning that is hands-on and student-driven, fostering engagement and retention of knowledge in any discipline. Here, we use this learning framework to engage students in exploring the effects of biotic and abiotic factors on animal dispersal as a means of connecting students to multiple ecological concepts. Instructors are provided with a guided lecture on key ecological concepts including the impacts of invasive species, dispersal mechanisms, and species interactions with the environment. Furthermore, the interactive lecture introduces students to the snail study system and explains the experimental process, which involves low-cost, readily available materials (e.g., kiddie pools). Students design experiments that explore how variables including density, substrate, and temperature can affect animal dispersal. They conduct the experiments, engage in a process of peer-review, analyze results, and share their study. We performed this lesson in an undergraduate Ecology course and report here on student responses to the experience. The lesson is designed to be performed with the faucet snail (Bithynia tentaculata), an invasive freshwater species throughout much of the Great Lakes region, but can be easily modified to accommodate other species. The lesson is also highly amenable to modifications for variable class sizes, student grade levels, and lesson duration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2236135
- PAR ID:
- 10507753
- Publisher / Repository:
- CourseSource
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CourseSource
- Volume:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 2332-6530
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Wessner, David R (Ed.)ABSTRACT The ubiquity and ease with which microbial cells disperse over space is a key concept in microbiology, especially in microbial ecology. The phenomenon prompted Baas Becking’s famous “everything is everywhere” statement that now acts as the null hypothesis in studies that test the dispersal limitation of microbial taxa. Despite covering the content in lectures, exam performance indicated that the concepts of dispersal and biogeography challenged undergraduate students in an upper-level Microbial Ecology course. Therefore, we iteratively designed a hands-on classroom activity to supplement the lecture content and reinforce fundamental microbial dispersal and biogeography concepts while also building quantitative reasoning and teamwork skills. In a class period soon after the lecture, the students formed three-to-five-person teams to engage in the activity, which included a hands-on dispersal simulation and worksheet to guide discussion. The simulation involved stepwise neutral immigration or emigration and then environmental selection on a random community of microbial taxa represented by craft poms. The students recorded the results at each step as microbial community data. A field guide was provided to identify the taxonomy based on the pom phenotype and a reference to each taxon’s preferred environmental niches. The worksheet guided a reflection of student observations during the simulation. It also sharpened quantitative thinking by prompting the students to summarize and visualize their and other teams’ microbial community data and then to compare the observed community distributions to the idealized expectation given only selection without dispersal. We found that the activity improved student performance on exam questions and general student satisfaction and comfort with the biogeography concepts. Activity instructions and a list of needed materials are included for instructors to reproduce for their classrooms.more » « less
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Introduction: Inquiry-based learning is vital to the engineering design process, and most crucially in the laboratory and hands-on settings. Through the model of inquiry-based design, student teams are able to formulate critical inputs to the design process and develop a stronger and more relevant understanding of theoretical principles and their applications. In the junior-level Biotransport laboratory course at Purdue University’s Weldon School of BME, the curriculum utilizes the engineering design process to guide students through three (3) different modules covering different Biotransport phenomena (diffusivity, mass transport, and heat transfer). Students are required to research, conceptualize, and generate hypotheses around a module prompt. Students design, execute, and analyze their own experimental setups to test the hypotheses within an autodidactic peer-learning structure. Methods: A multi-year study was completed spanning from 2014 to 2016, assessing students’ end of course evaluations. With an integration of the flipped lecture into the lab being first implemented in 2015 (prior to 2015, the flipped lecture was a stand-alone course offered outside of the lab sections), the data presented here offers a comparison of student evaluations between these two course structures. Per the student response rates, the sample size for each year was: n=81 (2016); n=60 (2015); n=48 (2014). The surveys were anonymous and a host of questions related to overall course satisfaction, structure, and content were posed. Results: Analysis of the data showed a consistent increase in overall student satisfaction with the course following the implementation of the new structure. The percent of students giving a satisfactory rating or higher for the 2014, 2015 and 2016 course offerings was 79%, 89%, 92%, respectively. This shows a significant difference between 2014 and 2016. Conclusion: The integration of a flipped lecture into the lab successfully improved student satisfaction and self-perceived understanding of course material. This format also improved the delivery of content to students as assessed by maintaining pertinence to the lab topics and clear understanding of learning concepts.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.24918/cs.2023.47
