To provide a laboratory setting for students to carry out scientific inquiry that originates with them in their first course in psychology, and to stimulate interest in teaching, St. Olaf College proposes to develop 1) investigative laboratories as a part of an introductory course for 120 students a year, and 2) a preceptor program offering students interested in teaching, an opportunity to teach in the laboratories during a subsequent term. Students in introductory psychology will participate with a faculty member in class for three hours per week and will then work an additional three hours per week in rotating laboratory sessions conducted by three faculty and preceptors. The laboratory will involve groups of 15 students in each of ten different laboratory sessions. It will provide opportunities for students to translate the curiosity psychology arouses into testable hypotheses, researchable questions, and to design experiments as well as to collect and analyze data. This course is taken by the majority of education majors, who must also take a course in educational psychology. For example, 80% of the current group of 80 seniors in the teacher education program took introductory psychology. Twelve of these students with a background in psychology are preparing to teach K-12 in the laboratory sciences (psychology, biology, chemistry, or physics). In the 1996-97 academic year, 150 students have applied for admission to the teacher education program, indicating its strong growth. Hence, the potential influence of investigative laboratories in introductory psychology is very high. Preceptors will follow the laboratory rotation with a group of introductory students, teaching, fostering student inquiry, helping students in the learning process, and evaluating their work. The goals of the project are: 1) to teach psychology as an investigative laboratory science on a college level from the very first course, 2) to encourage students, interested in college or secondar y school teaching, to teach psychology as an investigative science, 3) to encourage students to work together as a research community in the library, the laboratory and the field, and 4) to design a replicable model that will facilitate construction of investigative laboratory sciences at other colleges and universities.
