Combining novel research and community-engaged learning in an undergraduate physiology laboratory course

Abstract

To better prepare physiology students for 21st century careers, we incorporated classroom-based undergraduate research experiences and service learning/community-engaged learning (SLCE) into a college-level physiology laboratory course. The interventions were incorporated over 4 yr and assessed using validated surveys of student-reported learning gains related to attitudes toward science, the scientific process, and career paths. Students reported the greatest learning gains in those years when students did novel research oriented around a common theme of water quality. The gains were greater than those of a matched cohort that participated in an apprentice-style summer undergraduate research experience. With respect to the SLCE related to youth science literacy, students provided evidence of learning related to academics, personal growth, and civic mindedness. For example, many expressed discomfort about being in a new situation, often describing the differences between themselves and the youth with whom they interacted. However, students also grew in confidence about collaborating with people who were different from them and in their role as the “scientist.” Limitations of the study include the quasi-experimental design and the incorporation of multiple interventions at the same time. Future studies should examine improvement in content acquisition and competency-based learning skills. Nonetheless, these results suggest that both novel research and SLCE increase student learning in the context of an undergraduate physiology laboratory course. Many of the learning gains observed with the SLCE are particularly important for physiology students, many of whom aspire to careers in health sciences, where they will be regularly working with nonscientists.

Concept Map Assessment Reveals Short-Term Community-Engaged Fieldwork Enhances Sustainability Knowledge

“…It is clear that a classroom of students can be quickly trained to meaningfully provide data to community members, but it is fundamentally important to assess the learning gains of students. The benefit of service learning is assessed generally through traditional methods (i.e., reflection and assessment tests), but the extent to which student theoretical conceptions within their discipline begin to integrate community knowledge as a result of these experiences is unclear (Astin et al, 2000;Ash et al, 2005;Woodley et al, 2019). Because we recognize that community engagement is a complex, multifaceted process of interacting parts, some of the learning gains students achieve can be missed when the methods lack the ability to capture the interactivity of the experience.…”

Using a College Curriculum to Integrate Informal Science Learning Opportunities for University and Middle School Students

“…For instance, university students may gain increased social awareness and civic responsibility (Huda et al, 2018;Sewry and Paphitis, 2018), greater academic content mastery, and improved communication and problem-solving skills (McGinley, 2018). Notably, service-learning opportunities can also increase STEM undergraduate students' confidence in collaborating and commu-nicating with diverse audiences, potentially influencing their persistence in the STEM field (Woodley et al, 2019).…”

“…Communities also benefit from students' engagement in service-learning programs. For example, low-resourced communities may gain quality (in)formal educational programming (Woodley et al, 2019), or access to professional-level services from students at no cost (Yusop and Correia, 2014). Further, when scientists and STEM (under)graduate students engage in their communities through service-based learning (Sewry and Paphitis, 2018), they can increase the impacts of science communication, for example by engaging youth as future scientists (Hebets, 2018).…”

Physiology labs during a pandemic: What did we learn?

“…Organizations such as the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) and the National Institute on Scientific Teaching (NIST), formerly known as the Summer Institute on Scientific Teaching (SI), emerged in the wake of these reports. Additional working groups and reports soon followed, and the broader movement that emerged brought welcome change to many biology classrooms, focusing laboratory courses on training students to ask testable questions and to devise studies to address them ( 6 ). In those efforts, laboratory classes were no longer driven simply by the instrumentation present in the classroom.…”