Inquiry Interpreted for the Biological Sciences: Challenges and Triumphs

摘要

Inquiry based teaching methods allow students to become engaged in science by doing science as science is done by scientists. It encourages students to claim ownership of their experience by having them ask a question and answer it without a formal set of steps to do so. Adapting the inquiry method for the biological sciences has a number of challenges. First, much of what goes on is not easy to observe because it is either microscopic or contained within a living organism. Second, observable changes often take long periods of time to appear so that many experiments take days to weeks to complete. We have found that using either microbiology or molecular biology methods gives us a setting in which biology inquiry can be productively done. In this paper we reflect on a number of different inquiry activities in which we successfully adapted inquiry for biology.