The overarching goal of this project is to enable undergraduate students to think like scientists by integrating metacognitive practice into laboratory experiences. Most scientists implicitly learn metacognitive practice through one-on-one mentoring in the laboratory after finishing their undergraduate education. One immediate goal is to design undergraduate labs with projects involving open-ended research and formulate metacognitive prompts to help student examine their own thinking as they plan and execute experiments and interpret results. Many undergraduate students are not able to participate in a standard research experience working in a faculty research lab because of time and financial constraints. This project will increase the participation of all students in authentic research and strengthen their self-identification as scientists at an earlier stage in their education; it will be particularly beneficial for students from underserved groups.
The particular goal of this project is to develop and validate tools for assessing how students' scientific thinking changes in response to metacognitive interventions when engaged in authentic research. These tools will allow assessment of how students change their attitudes and approaches to problem solving as they matriculate through a series of linked laboratory courses with metacognitive training. Student interviews will be used to inform validated surveys administered to students as they move from 200- to 300- to 400-level courses. In addition to quantitative tools, interviews and student work will be used for qualitative analysis of student improvements. Case-by-case analysis, and cross-year interviews will assess changes in students' habits of mind. The laboratory course interventions will include 1) authentic research experiences in four laboratory courses from the 200-400 level using the model systems Tetrahymena thermophilae and Caenorhabditis elegans; 2) metacognitive training for students in the same four laboratory courses; 3) multiple exposures to metacognitive training by linking these courses in the curriculum. This project is significant because the novel laboratory courses will give more students the chance to engage in authentic research, and because the assessment tools that are developed will be adaptable for a wide array of STEM research experiences. This project will benefit students of all backgrounds, and help increase the diversity of STEM students at Western Washington University through increased recruitment and retention. Because metacognition is prerequisite for scientific thinking, it is likely that a combination of research experiences coupled with instruction to promote student self-reflection will enhance students' ability to resolve scientific problems; the tools developed in this project will be used to test this hypothesis in a future study.
This project is being jointly supported by the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education and the NSF Division of Biological Infrastructure as it aligns with an important subset of the objectives of both divisions that is expressed in the "Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education" effort (see http://visionandchange.org/).
