Many obstacles hold back students’ learning in science in K12 education. Some obstacles, such as parental involvement, school culture, and persuasive paradigms that “school is not cool” are a few, long-term hindrances. Only about 1 in 3 middle school students currently achieve proficient scores on state tests. With great burdens and distressing statistics, what can teachers do? They can make short-term changes in pedagogy to increase motivation and responsibility in their students.
This project aimed to explore a type of pedagogy, called place-based inquiry, which allows students to use the natural environment in which they live as an inquiry-based learning environment. Students gained knowledge and learned skills that could apply across the curriculum. In a rural middle school, in northwestern New Mexico, 170 students engaged in a two-week unit, broadly exploring the nature of life science. During this unit, students classified things as biotic and abiotic. They learned basic identification of common plant species on the school campus, and they correctly used binomial nomenclature to speak of these species. Students designed an observational study – they formulated questions, wrote procedures, collected data, and drew conclusions.
Results/Conclusions
At the end of the unit, most students had successfully designed and implemented an observational study. Students conducted “real science” – neither the teacher nor the students knew the results of the study beforehand.
This style of pedagogy was successful for several reasons. First, students were motivated to answer questions that they typically could not answer with a textbook. An example question that was investigated was, Which has wider leaves, Hordeum jubatum or Melilotus indica? Second, students gained knowledge and skills that could be used across the curriculum – measuring with SI units, collaborating with classmates, generating and testing hypotheses, designing tables and graphs, and interpreting results. Students also developed interesting questions about their school campus. Many follow-up questions asked why most of the species on campus were nonnative.
This method did have several downsides, however. For instance, the teacher had hoped students would use a variety of measurements – mass, volume, surface area, density, etc. However, all students chose to measure only length. In addition, this project was most successful with students who were mature and responsible, because designing and conducting experiments gives students a lot of freedom, which requires a larger amount of integrity than traditional, classroom-based, stand-and-deliver pedagogy.