Inquiry-Based Learning: Cognitive Measures & Systems Support (Home)

Education Research

The project interleaves classroom research and software development, each informing the other.

Our educational research treats introductory science instruction at Hampshire College as a naturally-occurring environment, or living laboratory, for the study of inquiry-oriented teaching and learning at the college level.

Our main educational research goals are to characterize the goals and practices of science instruction at Hampshire and to use them as benchmarks in the development and testing of new educational software.

Educational Research Methods

• Faculty Interviews
  • attempted to characterize the Hampshire science faculty's conception of their instructional goals and practices
  • audiotaped, content analysis
  • produced sets of overarching goals and methods for inquiry-oriented instruction
  • higher-order categories were used to design a classroom observation instrument and a critical-thinking assessment for use in the Fall semester of 1998
  • results of the faculty interview study will be reported at the AERA and National Association of Research in Science Teaching (NARST) conventions in the Spring of 1999
• Classroom Observation
  • attempted to characterize how the faculty conception of inquiry-oriented instruction is actually implemented in the classroom
  • involved observation of four introductory science classes at Hampshire:
    • Evolution of the Earth, a geology course oriented toward field research projects;
    • Musical Acoustics, a topic-oriented physics course oriented toward acoustic measurement and fabrication projects;
    • Human Biology, a biology course that employs medical-diagnosis case studies;
    • Human Evolution, a biology course that emphasizes readings in the primary literature on human evolution.
  • observers present in at least half of class meetings, coding each meeting in terms of a goals-by-methods matrix that was developed from the faculty interview research. The reliability of the coding was assessed by having two independent observers code a number of classes. Observers also took anecdotal notes on each class meeting.
  • involved collaboration with the NSF's STEMTEC grant to the University of Massachusetts and Five Colleges, Inc.
  • quantitative and qualitative data analysis to be completed during the Spring of 1999. Some early results will be presented at the Spring 1999 AERA and NARST conventions.
• Student Assessment Research
  • studies cognitive change and learning outcomes in students
  • uses goals derived from the faculty interviews to design a series of open-ended questions that probe students' ability to think scientifically about novel scientific research scenarios
  • produced tests that have been piloted at the University of Massachusetts, at another liberal arts college, and on 80% of the Hampshire entering class
  • involves significant collaboration between our project and program evaluation for a grant to Hampshire from Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  • pre- and post- results will be compared for science and non-science students at Hampshire and for science students at the comparison college. Some early results will be presented at the Spring 1999 AERA and NARST conventions.

An example of our educational research.

A paper on our critical thinking research.