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ABLE 2007: University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY June 5-9. Host: Ruth Beattie
E-mail: rebeat1@uky.edu
Mini Workshop
Friday June 9
Gormally, Cara
Guiding Questions: A strategy to promote more effective and independent group work in
inquiry labs
One major goal in the inquiry-based laboratory is to encourage student thinking
and problem solving. Students, particularly in introductory non-major
labs, often need more guidance to think through an experimental design than
their peers can provide. Brief discussions and thoughtful questions posed
by the instructor often facilitates group thinking. In a large lab setting,
however, this important interaction is often compromised by the higher student:
instructor ratio. We have struggled to find a delicate balance, therefore,
between giving the students enough background content in order to conduct their
experiments in the limited lab time and providing cookbook, formulaic lab material.
In one particularly challenging lab sequence of our introductory biology course
for non-majors, students design genetic crosses to determine the genotypes of
a mystery C. elegans. For this lab sequence, we have developed
a series of guiding questions to help focus students’ thinking to maximize
productive group discussion about experimental designs. Our goals are to
promote more active student participation within each group and less reliance
on the instructor to guide group thinking. We present preliminary results
about the success of this method.