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

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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.