As part of a campus-wide effort to transform introductory science courses to be more engaging and more accurately convey the excitement of discovery in science, the curriculum of an introductory physical geology lab course was redesigned. What had been a series of "cookbook" lab activities was transformed into a sequence of activities based on scientific inquiry and cooperative learning. The first two semesters were spent developing and implementing the new lab activities, and two more semesters were spent refining them. In the second semester of each of these two phases, students enrolled in the lab completed a 15-question version of the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI; Libarkin and Anderson, 2005); there were significant improvements from pretest to posttest scores. Student evaluations before and after the reform are not significantly different and overall positive. This paper presents an overview of the lab activities in the new curriculum, a detailed analysis of the type and level of inquiry in each lab, and the assessment of the impact on student learning. Keywords inquiry, introductory geology lab Disciplines Curriculum and Instruction | Earth Sciences | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Educational Methods CommentsThis article is published as Moss, Elizabeth, and Cinzia Cervato. "Quantifying the level of inquiry in a reformed introductory geology lab course. ABSTRACTAs part of a campus-wide effort to transform introductory science courses to be more engaging and more accurately convey the excitement of discovery in science, the curriculum of an introductory physical geology lab course was redesigned. What had been a series of ''cookbook'' lab activities was transformed into a sequence of activities based on scientific inquiry and cooperative learning. The first two semesters were spent developing and implementing the new lab activities, and two more semesters were spent refining them. In the second semester of each of these two phases, students enrolled in the lab completed a 15-question version of the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI; Libarkin and Anderson, 2005); there were significant improvements from pretest to posttest scores. Student evaluations before and after the reform are not significantly different and overall positive. This paper presents an overview of the lab activities in the new curriculum, a detailed analysis of the type and level of inquiry in each lab, and the assessment of the impact on student learning. Ó

This study examines the effects of an extended authentic research experience on students' understanding of the nature of science (NOS) and self-efficacy toward science. The curriculum of an introductory physical geology lab was transformed to include a six-week, student-driven research project focused on local groundwater and surface water issues. Students' NOS understanding was measured by using a modified version of the Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry questionnaire (n = 181) and their science self-efficacy using a modified vocational self-efficacy survey (n = 179). Data were collected on students during four semesters. We found that the combination of having students explicitly reflect on the NOS and working on a research project improves students' overall NOS understanding, and that the increase was higher for female students. We found that for non-STEM students the research project alone had a more positive effect on their NOS understanding. A research project alone did not significantly increase non-STEM students' science self-efficacy, but adding explicit NOS reflections did, and more so for female students. The self-efficacy of STEM students increased more than the one of non-STEM students if they completed both a research project and reflected on NOS concepts. This complex set of results suggests that there are multiple ways to implement an authentic research experience to increase students' NOS understanding, whereas to increase students' self-efficacy, reflections on the NOS are a good strategy, particularly for STEM students. For female students, a promising approach is designing an experiment and reflecting on the NOS.

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We changed the curriculum of our introductory geology lab to include a six-week, student driven research project focused on local groundwater and surface water issues, seeking to determine whether or not this experience was an effective means to increase students' understanding of the nature of science and self-efficacy towards science. In addition to developing the research project curriculum, we worked with other university faculty to create a local hydrology research station which included eight monitoring wells and a stream gage, allowing students to collect their own water-level and water-quality data as well as to retrieve automatically collected data. In order to measure nature of science understanding, we used a modified version of the Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry questionnaire (Liang et al., 2005; Clough, 2010). We modified a vocational self-efficacy survey (Riggs et al. 1994) to measure science self-efficacy. Both instruments had average Cronbach's alpha values >0.8, making them reliable for our study. After three semesters of collecting data, we have found that an authentic research project slightly improves, but does not significantly increase overall nature of science understanding or science self-efficacy. Disaggregating the data into demographic sub-groups, nature of science understanding increased relatively more in non-STEM students than STEM students, and science self-efficacy increased relatively more in STEM students than non-STEM students.