Participating in science is recognized by AAAS in their Vision and Change: A Call to Action Report as being as critical to the biology curriculum as understanding foundational concepts. How students actually progress to a full skill set of a scientist has not been fully developed in traditional or even open ended inquiry labs where the outcome is the “lab report”. How can students begin to master the skill set to more fully participate as scientists? The use of large data sets and a strategic emphasis on different sections of lab reports guide introductory students to become apprentice scientists. An initial emphasis on data collection “frees” students from writing a full report and asks them to recognize the responsibility and challenges of analysis.
Our curriculum goals for students are to: Utilize primary literature to make predictions; Design and implement an experiment, including large data set management and large group data collection and sharing; Collect and visualize data connected with the their individual hypotheses and predictions.
Results/Conclusions
We have learned that an overtly guided set of targeted skills directed at components of investigative research builds critical thinking skills and a deeper understanding of the variety of pathways that scientific research takes. When research is centered around large data set collection, management and descriptive statistical analysis students begin to understand the importance of past research, well thought out questions, hypotheses and predictions, how these inform experimental design and the connections between an introduction and conclusion section of a research report.
Ecological data sets lend themselves well to this type of guided skill development pedagogy. We will use examples of how each skill set is developed with one of our main examples of student success demonstrated by a student phenology research project.