Open-ended & student-driven engagement with hypotheses in evolutionary medicine

Open-ended, student-driven assignments are a powerful tool for increasing engagement with difficult concepts. Instead of a term paper, students in an upper-division Evolutionary Medicine course were tasked with choosing a malady and explaining its proximate and ultimate causes creatively. Students gained ownership by choosing their group’s size, their research topic, and their final product’s nature and audience. They demonstrated rigor of thought by submitting a referenced, bulleted outline of their research and reflected on how they conveyed science to a lay audience through a metacognitive essay. Students were proud of their products, as demonstrated by their self-organized show-and-tell day.