INQUIRY-BASED LABORATORY COURSE IMPROVES STUDENTS' ABILITY TO DESIGN EXPERIMENTS AND INTERPRET DATA

• Published in: Advances in physiology education Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 26 - 33
• Main Authors: Myers, Marcella J, Burgess, Ann B
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Physiological Society 01-03-2003
• Subjects: Anatomy & physiology; Clinical Laboratory Techniques; College students; Curricula; Educational evaluation; Educational Measurement; Exercise - physiology; Goals; Group Processes; Heart Rate - physiology; Humans; Physiology - education; Science education; Teaching; Wisconsin; Wisconsin
• ISSN: 1043-4046; 1522-1229
• DOI: 10.1152/advan.00028.2002

1 Department of Biology, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota 55105
2 Biology Core Curriculum, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706
We redesigned our intermediate-level organismal physiology laboratory course to center on student-designed experiments in plant and human physiology. Our primary goals were to improve the ability of students to design experiments and analyze data. We assessed these abilities at the beginning and end of the semester by giving students an evaluation tool consisting of an experimental scenario, data, and four questions of increasing complexity. To control for nontreatment influences, the improvement scores (final minus initial score for each question) of students taking both the laboratory and the companion lecture course were compared with those of students taking the lecture course only. The laboratory + lecture group improved more than the lecture-only group for the most challenging question. This evidence suggests that our inquiry-based curriculum is achieving its primary goals. The evaluation tool that we developed may be useful to others interested in measuring experimental analysis abilities in their students.
Key words: college science instruction; assessment of learning; student-designed experiments; evaluation tool