There is a disconnect between the way scientific knowledge is generated and the way it has been traditionally presented in classrooms. Frequently coursework is segregated into discreet subjects and investigative work may be all but removed from the K-12 level. In college courses, lab is frequently separate from lecture. The result is a misconception that science primarily concerns facts to be memorized. This presents challenges when one attempts to engage students in the complex topics that arise in ecology. To address this challenge we created a new science course for teacher education majors. The result was Science 101, an interdisciplinary, investigative science course designed to improve knowledge of scientific content and how the content is generated. Each semester of Science 101 centers on a theme, including themes such as Environmental Science, Energy, and Motion. Lecture and lab are fully integrated, and students are encouraged to build understanding through open-ended laboratories they design and implement. We hypothesized that students enrolled in Science 101 would have better content understanding and fewer misconceptions about the nature of science than students who covered similar content in traditional classes.The impact of Science 101 on content mastery was measured by comparing exam scores of education majors enrolled in Science 101 with those enrolled in two lecture courses, Bio 300 (a general education course about ecological principles and environmental impact) and Bio 122 (a general education course about energy flow through cells and ecosystems). Questions from final exams from these courses were coded by content (climate, trophic interactions, cellular energy, evolution, and other) and by rigor. Data from the most recent three semesters were analyzed.
Results/Conclusions
Content understanding was found to be significantly higher for students enrolled in Science 101 regardless of theme. The differences were especially apparent on questions regarding evolution, but were also significant for questions on climate and energy. The higher level of content mastery was achieved despite the fact that Science 101 assessments contained a higher percentage of analysis and application questions, as opposed to basic knowledge questions, compared to the other courses. The results of our study suggest that integrating inquiry based labs with course content improves mastery of science content knowledge. We anticipate that this will also translate into greater teacher competence as these students graduate and begin to teach science content.
