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HBO/WO

MBO

2024

How to design open inquiry labs

In this article we show how student “open inquiries” in undergraduate labs can be powerful teaching and assessment methods. In such open inquiries it is the students who define the question they want to answer, formulate the hypothesis, search for information, design and carry out experiments to reach their goal, and share their ideas, needs, and results with others. This student agency afforded by open inquiry trains critical thinking, teaches students to learn from failure, and requires effective science communication in authentic contexts. Adapting open inquiry methods for the first time can be especially daunting for instructors who have no examples to draw upon. To address this challenge we explain the findings of a diverse group of five lab instructors and an educational researcher who have compared open inquiry practices in different contexts. As a group, we formed a Community of Practice dedicated to “Supporting students’ scientific Open Inquiries in Labs” (aka SssOIL). The commonalities across our diverse project team suggest some defining features and best practices. By sharing our findings and example course designs and materials, we hope to aid instructors in adapting more open inquiry teaching methods in their own lab courses. Any questions about this article can be addressed to Forrest via: forrestbradbury@gmail.com or to our team via: S3OIL@outlook.com

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Forrest Bradbury, Simone Mesman, Morten Stromme, Paul Logman

2023

Maker Lab Assignments: Two Main Open Inquiry Projects

Two thirds of the Maker Lab course is dedicated to two large open inquiry projects which students conceive, design, and carry out in pairs. As detailed in Appendix 1 of the Maker Lab course description (linked below), there are seven rules limiting students' open inquiry project topics: projects must involve empirical research in one or more of the natural sciences the research methods must utilize quantitative modeling of empirical measurements the research methods must utilize an Arduino in some non-trivial way (usually for controlling electronic sensors, or sometimes just using its voltage measurement capabilities) something in the inquiry must go beyond high school level science: the research methods (measurement techniques and/or mathematical modeling) and/or the scientific phenomena being studied projects must be doable within the allowed time, with some buffer for inevitable failed trials or delays and time to iteratively improve • no more than 40 euros may be spent per project (often for buying a new kind of sensor or various unstocked equipment or supplies). Basic supplies are already included in the student toolboxes and many other types of equipment are already in-stock in the Maker Closet, so permission must be asked and granted before purchasing items. The costs (including shipping) will be reimbursed if reusable equipment will be returned (or if consumable items are used sparingly) and if official receipts of purchases are submitted. Finally, since the projects are relatively short, shipping times need to be a couple days max and shipping from outside the EU is not possible (due to long delays in customs). students must follow safe and ethical practices in their work, where safety is regulated by adhering to equipment user manuals and discussions with instructor (and direct supervision and/or help if dangerous equipment or substances are required), while ethical practices begin by following AUC’s ethics checklist and oversight procedures for pursuing any experiments with humans, animals, data or property of others, or environmental systems. See Canvas for more information. The subpages below link to the following: grading form for pre-recorded video "Midway" presentation grading form for pre-recorded video "Final" presentation Maker Lab course schedule (example) where the open inquiry supervision process is detailed per class-session Maker Lab course description, which includes practicalities of the open inquiry process and assessment Lecture Notes chapter 6: Empirical Research Process (a rough guide to the iterative process of empirical open inquiry) Additionally, this page itself includes two documents: a template for the students' pre-proposal at the start of each open inquiry project (which must be approved by the instructor) a template for students' electronic lab journals (which is not currently assessed for the course grade) Both of these template documents are Jupyter Notebook files. If you do not (yet) have Jupyter Notebook, you cannot fully utilize the .ipynb file. But the PDF documents (also attached) will give an idea of their content and functionality.

Forrest Bradbury

2023

Supporting Students’ Scientific Open Inquiries in Labs (SssOIL) collection

Supporting Students’ Scientific Open Inquiries in Labs (aka SssOIL) is a group devoted to using and sharing open inquiry teaching methods in higher education science lab courses. The group members are: Lesley de Putter: Eindhoven School of Education (Eindhoven University of Technology) Paul Logman: Physics & ICLON (Leiden University) Morten Strømme: Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (University of Amsterdam) Simone Mesman: Swammerdam Life Sciences (University of Amsterdam) Martijs Jonker: Swammerdam Life Sciences (University of Amsterdam) Forrest Bradbury: Amsterdam University College This page contains links to the group's playbook for open inquiry (both English and Dutch) and the sub-pages below link to individual collections of course materials from several open inquiry lab courses, as well as the team's article on "How to design open inquiry labs". Any questions about this entire collection can be addressed to our team via: S3OIL@outlook.com

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Forrest Bradbury, Paul Logman, Simone Mesman, Morten Stromme

2023

Maker Lab Open Inquiry: Presentation grading forms

Each of the Maker Lab's two Open Inquiry projects requires two graded presentations: a midway presentation by one of the two team members, and a final presentation by the other team member. These are submitted as pre-recorded videos. The midway videos are played during class, each followed by 10 minute live-Q&A sessions with peers and instructor(s). The final videos, on the other hand, are not played during class. Instead the presenter gives an abbreviated live version during class, followed by a 5-10 minute live-Q&A session with peers and instructor(s). Students are instructed to pitch the level of the talk at their peers (who have not done nor closely followed their inquiry). Students are further given these grading forms in advance to see on which assessment criteria their talk will be judged. Note: Simple "grading forms" are used instead of rubrics, with the difference being that performance levels are not individually described. I use grading forms instead of rubrics for several reasons: 1. I am the only grader for the course, thus inter-rater reliability is not an issue. 2. I include 10-12 specific assessment criteria which themselves help to communicate expectations, 3. The diverse student projects make it difficult to create meaningful level descriptors, and 4. I often leave explanatory remarks under the individual assessment criteria to explain my marks.

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Forrest Bradbury

2023

Maker Lab course schedule (example)

This example Maker Lab course schedule is meant to help show how the course is structured and implemented. In addition to the full .pdf schedule, a pictoral representation is given to show the basic timeline, starting with skills training and then two open inquiries. Note that this example schedule has benefitted from four previous course iterations, and has been tweaked each time for better and more efficient student support. Instructors implementing open inquiry lab projects for the first time are advised to schedule in a bit extra student contact time until they have a good sense of when and how the students need to be supported.

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Forrest Bradbury

2023

Maker Lab readings and lecture slides for students

This collection of the Maker Lab's readings and lecture slides for students is primarily used in the first course phase on training specific research skills and preparing students for the open inquiry phases. Specifically, students learn about experimental design and uncertainty analysis, and learn and practice some important programming skills for controlling sensors and processing and analyzing data. This material is further divided between: Lecture Notes (student reading material) Lecture Slides and Lecture Announcements (detailing what the instructor and students are doing in class sessions)

Forrest Bradbury

2020

Molecular Neurobiology, 3rd year BSc Psychobiology, UvA

Here you can find the basic course information necessary for the open inquiry course Molecular Neuroscience at the UvA. Molecular Neurobiology is part of the Genetics and Molecular Cell Biology learning trajectory. It is a 3rd year elective in which students get a crash course of 4 weeks in research design, execution, analysis, and interpretation. Students are divided in research-groups of 10-12 students under supervision of a ‘Principal Investigator’, who is assigned to a specific table and helps the student throughout the course with their ideas, execution, and interpretation. These PI’s are usually PhD students that will assist the students in designing their own research plan and experiments. Each research group receives a research topic (either ALS of Parkinson’s disease) and a toolbox to design and perform experiments with (LabBuddy and ExperD). Students have 4 weeks to execute their ideas, write a research report, and present their results and conclusions to their peers. The overall learning goal of this course is that students become familiar with the difficulties of scientific research. They need to become aware of what kind of information a specific model system can give you and what the specific strengths and shortcomings of different approaches and experiments are.

Website

Forrest Bradbury

2023

Maker Lab Lecture Slides and Lecture Announcements

This collection of the Maker Lab's Lecture Slides and Lecture Announcements (alongside the Lecture Notes and several Assignments files) detail the learning material and activities that prepare students for the open inquiry phases. Specifically, students learn about experimental design and uncertainty analysis, and learn and practice some important programming skills for controlling sensors and processing and analyzing data. For context of how these lectures fit into the course activities, please see the example course schedule (published as a sub-page of the main "Maker Lab: full course materials" page). The Lecture Slides are .PDF files of the Powerpoint slides, while the .TXT documents are pre- or post-lecture announcements posted to the course's digital learning environment. The course runs over 15 teaching weeks, with two 90 minute class sessions per week ("a" and "b"), which explains the naming system of these files, with names that begin with the week number and session letter. Note that many class sessions (especially after the open inquiry phases begin in session 5b) have no lectures or other materials because they are devoted to students' team presentations or individual meetings between teams and instructor. Additionally, lectures 1b and 2a include exercises and discussions using Arduino code files, with the file extensions .INO, which are also included here. NOTE: These uploads are not yet working. Please reach out if you're interested in the files. NOTE: Instructors interested in having the original powerpoint files of the Lecture Slides are encouraged to reach out to me via forrestbradbury ("AT") gmail.com .

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Forrest Bradbury

2023

Maker Lab Lecture Notes

This collection of the Maker Lab's Lecture Notes (alongside the Lecture Sldies and several Assignments files) detail some of the learning material and activities that prepare students for the open inquiry phases. Specifically, students learn to use Python for data analysis & visualization and uncertainty analysis, and are given an overview into the processes of empirical research in the natural sciences. Note: These Lecture Notes files are written as Jupyter Notebooks, often containing interactive features (though static PDFs are also provided for the benefit of non-users of Jupyter Notebooks). It is possible and convenient to download all of the Maker Lab's Jupyter Notebook files at once via the JupyterPython-materials zip file - unpacking it (extracting the files) to your preferred local directory. This zip file of all Jupyter Notebook materials is located here: https://search.edusources.nl/materialen/d144774e-9705-489a-b3cd-28e3618f7324

Forrest Bradbury

2023

Maker Lab: full course materials

This is an open inquiry natural science lab course utilizing Maker tools (e.g. inexpensive electronic sensors/sensorboards controlled by Arduinos). Students are tasked with conceiving, designing, and carrying out scientific experiments with significant process guidance but little experimental oversight, instead leveraging the Maker movement's online resources and open source hardware and software tools. Target audience: The course is given at Amsterdam University College to a multidisciplinary mix of natural science bachelor's students, usually in their second or third year of a three year bachelor's. Duration / Study load: 6 ECTS course, equivalent to ~168 total hours of student work, evenly spread across a 16 week term Over-arching learning goals: (see also the Learning Objectives subpage for specific, assessable list) students navigate the iterative empirical research process, including conception, experimental design, testing, data & uncertainty analyses, and drawing conclusions students build self-efficacy in conducting quantitative empirical research and creating scientific knowledge students improve science communication skills in an authentic (team) setting Directory: Course materials are published in the following locations (see links to them below) course description (pre-requisites, learning activities, teaching roles, grouping of students, learning environment) learning objectives course schedule readings and lecture slides for students assignments (and rubrics) resource list: facilities, equipment, software JupyterPython-materials zip file This page's linked websites give official course descriptions. Any questions about this Maker Lab course can be addressed to Forrest via: forrestbradbury@gmail.com

Website

Forrest Bradbury