Teaching Scientific Inquiry Through Inter-disciplinary Problem-based Modules: Students as Partners in Ongoing Applied Research

我们的目标是提高低年级本科生对科学探究技能的学习和对科学内容的保留。我们面临的具体挑战是，学生们没有通过他们的课程获得科学探究技能。此外，很少有学生能记住重要的科学概念，因为他们没有把这些概念与他们的生活联系起来。为了应对这些挑战，我们正在开发基于问题的模块，以监测我们地区退化盐沼的恢复情况。通过主动学习，引导学生提出自己的问题并提出实验。他们正在发展和应用他们的科学知识来解决当地感兴趣的问题，目的是增加他们对科学过程的知识和对科学内容的理解。这些模块被用于非专业综合科学课程以及化学和生物入门课程。这些课程的学生可以通过为整个项目开发的综合网站访问彼此的问题、实验和数据。两个学科的整合和不同层次的研究有助于理解应用问题解决的跨学科性质。该机构作为西班牙裔服务机构（HIS）服务于加利福尼亚的不同截面。我们通过对每个基于问题的模块中的内容和流程知识进行前后测试，并将基于问题的模块中的内容知识与每门课程中非基于问题的部分中获得的相关内容知识进行比较，来评估该计划的有效性。

Our goal is to enhance lower division undergraduate learning of science inquiry skills and retention of science content. Our specific challenge is that students are not gaining scientific inquiry skills through their coursework. Furthermore, few students retain important scientific concepts because they don't relate these concepts to their lives. We are meeting these challenges by developing problem-based modules to monitor the restoration of a degraded salt marsh in our area. Through active learning students are being guided to create their own questions and propose experiments. They are developing and applying their scientific knowledge to problems of local interest, with the aim of increasing both their knowledge of scientific process and their understanding of science content. The modules are being used in a non-majors integrated science course and in introductory chemistry and biology courses. Students in these courses have access to each other's questions, experiments, and data through a composite web site developed for the entire project. The integration of two disciplines and investigations at different levels facilitates understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of applied problem solving. The institution serves a diverse cross section of California as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HIS). We are evaluating the effectiveness of this program through pre- and post-testing of content and process knowledge within each problem based module and by comparing content knowledge in the problem-based modules with the relative content knowledge gained in the non-problem-based parts of each course.