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Sample Proposal: Independent Inquiry

Jackson School of Geosciences

Please direct all questions about the flag proposal process to the Center for the Skills & Experience Flags.

GEO 371T Research Design, Data Analysis and Visualization

Department of Geological Sciences

Please describe how students will engage in independent investigation and presentation of their own work through the course. Please explain specifically how your course engages students in the process of inquiry in your discipline.

N.B. A writing flag proposal was sent in for the same course but with the wrong semester listed — class offering is in spring 2017. Undergraduates in the course complete a research project throughout the course of the semester. While generally this has to involve culling data from the literature (due to the short period of the semester), the project design, the data sources, and analytical methods are all proposed by the students themselves. Each step in the project design process is mentored, project examples are shown to help guide the students in choosing a project of appropriate scope. Basic (but field standard) methods for data analysis and data visualization appropriate to paleobiology are taught. I have successfully taught versions of this class over the past two years.

What kinds of projects, artifacts, presentations, or performances do your students produce as a result of engaging in this process of inquiry?

The students complete a short scientific paper with figures, figure captions and bibliography. Appendices of their raw data are appended. Five in class peer-reviews of the written sections of the paper (Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Discussion and Conclusions) are undertaken throughout the course of the semester. I have had students develop these projects into honors theses.

Please explain what independent work students will do in this course. If students are engaged in team-based projects, explain how every student will exercise responsibility for and independence with some portion of the project.

Students have their own projects. They formulate a hypothesis they wish to test, gather context on what has been done, identify key variables and data types they need to investigate and then gather data from the literature or, in rare cases, specimens on hand in the lab. They do not generate new data but can answer substantial questions of their own design and, as a finished product, have a review paper or meta-analysis that can serve as preliminary data for an NSF predoctoral fellowship or other grant program.

What pedagogical strategies do you use to prepare students to undertake the inquiry process in your course? If applicable, how does the work that students produce in this course build upon skills or knowledge they have developed in previous coursework?

Generally, the students have taken my introductory course in paleobiology. My pedagogical strategies are focused on active learning and socratic method. I ask students to present frequently (in addition to in class peer review of written assignments). The class is run as a dialogue and most of the out-of-class work is the student’s data gathering, construction of the dataset, preparation of the frequent written assignments. Every week they present what they discovered the previous week in the first part of class, and we workshop their next steps. I have mentored 20+ undergraduate students in inquiry/research outside of the classroom setting. Over the past two years I have been trying out different pedagogies for mentoring inquiry in the classroom.

Please specify what percentage of the students’ grade is based on the process of inquiry as described above. Note that for a 3-hour course, at least one-third of the course grade must be based on the students’ independent investigation and presentation of their own work. (Students’ independent work must constitute one-half of the grade for 2-hour courses and all of the grade for 1-hour courses.)

50% of the course is writing and 50% inquiry.