Among the most important skills that students of science must acquire are critical thinking, effective communication, and ethical reasoning. Moreover, inquiry-based learning is a project-based pedagogic strategy that involves the formulation of questions and the development and implementation of strategies to answer such questions, and this type of learning has been shown to significantly enhance critical thinking skills. This project addresses these attributes by their inclusion in a novel inquiry-based cell biology laboratory course at Clemson University that consists of three research modules (four weeks each) designed to allow students to ask and answer questions via experimentation and collaboration. The modules have been designed around important cell biology concepts such as cell-cell and cell-substrate interactions, cell growth, death and differentiation, vesicle trafficking, and signal transduction. Students are acquiring "hands on" experience in a variety of techniques including fluorescence microscopy, spectrophotometry, and fluorimetry. Importantly, each week's lab session ends with a guided group discussion to interpret the results of experiments and to develop hypotheses for the next set of experiments. To address communication, each module culminates with the dissemination of the scientific data through a poster presentation, oral presentation, or manuscript in standard journal format. A crucial, but often overlooked, dimension of scientific communication is ethical reasoning so, as a part of the scientific inquiry and communication processes, students also engage in the discussion of the ethics of scientific communication. Extensive assessment in critical thinking and technical communication is part of the evaluation of the course as are science-related attitudes of course participants since evidence suggests that acquiring critical thinking skills may positively impact retention of students in the sciences.
Each year, approximately two hundred and twenty-five biological sciences, microbiology, genetics, biochemistry, bioengineering, chemical engineering, and animal and veterinary sciences undergraduate students are being directly impacted by the project. The project team includes an interdisciplinary team of faculty from biological sciences, technical communication, and education. The creation and dissemination of a distinctive cell biology laboratory course that significantly combines inquiry-based research, science communication, and ethical reasoning components is expected to significantly contribute to research in STEM education.
