The development and implementation of an inquiry-based poster project on sustainability in a large non-majors environmental science course

Background/Question/Methods

Improving environmental education is commonly regarded as a key to equipping society with an educated citizenry of stakeholders to address the global challenges facing humanity. However, despite a long-standing appreciation for the value of education directed toward the development of learners’ understanding of the natural world, systematic research over the past two decades has revealed that a significant proportion of American college graduates fail to grasp a basic knowledge of fundamental concepts associated with environmental issues. In that large lecture-based courses are often one of the few formal educational experiences that most college students have in the sciences, it is of particular concern that empirical evaluations of such classes have reported minimal differential gains in students’ conceptual learning and familiarity with how the scientific community “does science”. In an effort to introduce non-science students to environmental issues and the scientific enterprise, an inquiry-based poster project was developed for a large general education environmental science class at a public Midwestern research university. Through the term long project intended to situate learning in an authentic context, students (n=64) worked in a self-directed and collaborative means to collect and analyze data regarding sustainability topics. Students’ findings were disseminated in a poster presentation during a culminating research symposium that was attended by departmental faculty and university administrators.

Results/Conclusions

The effectiveness of the inquiry-based sustainability project was assessed using instructor-designed evaluations. The results indicated a positive association between the inquiry projects and students’ self-reported outcomes in respect to content knowledge (88%) and learning the scientific process (90%). Representational comments such as “it [the project] helped me to grasp a better understanding of sustainability” and “helped me to make the topics real through hands-on surveys and research” suggest the efficacy of the project in promoting student learning of topics introduced in the classroom through real-world application. As inquiry-based activities remain largely underutilized in college science classes, this work adds to the rising literature of how such projects can be readily incorporated into a large environmental science classroom. From the instructor’s and students’ perspective, the collaborative activity was successful in engaging students in the learning process, advancing content knowledge, and contributed to students’ integration of class topics with real-world applications. In addition, as many of the sustainability topics lent well to service learning, which is considered to be effective in altering attitude and behaviors, the project seemingly improved the students’ appreciation of local environmental problems and sustainable solutions.