Despite the inclusion of a lab component in many STEM courses, college students often struggle to apply these skills in different situations. This outbreak simulation gives students a taste of some of the challenges associated with being in charge of an essential research project. Students will hone their grant writing, presentation skills, experimental design, data analysis, ability to prepare for failed experiments, and ability to understand the big picture of their research. Senior undergraduate biology students are split into small groups that represent distinct laboratories. Each laboratory receives the same starting information about an emerging pandemic. The laboratories must use their knowledge and innovation to design a series of experiments to identify the pathogen, and progress toward a treatment and/or a vaccine to limit the global spread of infection. My students unanimously felt that the outbreak simulation helped solidify their understanding of research and improved their engagement. One student reflected that “[the simulation] was very effective in furthering my limited knowledge on pandemics, the characteristics of disease spread, experimental design, writing grants, types of assays, and vaccine development. Despite studying science for so many years, experimental research is not something that had been well addressed.”

The scientific method is a core element of all science. Yet, its different implementations are remarkably diverse, based on the varied concepts and protocols required in each specific instance of science. For experienced scientists, coping with this diversity is second nature: they readily and continually ask tractable questions even outside their expertise, and find the process of forming hypotheses, designing tests, and interpreting results fairly transparent. At the secondary school stage, the scientific method is often introduced as a series of clear steps in a pre-planned lab activity. In between these two stages comes the essential step of abandoning the supports of a step-by-step approach, and instead learning how to work through the scientific method to generate and answer one's own questions. In our experience, this process is rarely taught explicitly. Yet, undergraduate students (even strong students) can have difficulty translating their initial questions into testable hypotheses, and designing and interpreting appropriate corresponding tests. To combat this difficulty, we have developed a conceptual framework that distinguishes the fundamental concepts of pattern and cause. This framework guides undergraduates directly to posing tractable questions, formulating testable hypotheses (descriptive or mechanistic), and designing clear tests (surveys or experiments). Anecdotal evidence, including our in-course assessments and student feedback, suggests this approach leads to improvement of students’ scientific abilities. The benefits are noticeable when students apply the scientific method to their own questions and also while interpreting science reported in biological literature.

Surveys have shown that a proportion of the American public accepts pseudoscientific claims as scientific facts. The critical evaluation of these claims via classroom discussion about pseudoscience is important because instructors and students cannot test every pseudoscientific claim. Instructors can provide a framework to use in evaluating such claims both inside and outside the classroom, arming students with knowledge. I describe an activity that provides both an example of a pseudoscientific claim – astrology – and a framework for classroom discussion of pseudoscience as students work in groups to experimentally test predictions of horoscopes. The activity is appropriate for freshman college students in an online or classroom biology laboratory and can be adapted for high school students.

Hands-on activities with live organisms allow students to actively explore scientific investigation. Here, I present activities that combine guided inquiry with direct instruction and relate how nutrition affects the physiology and behavior of the common housefly. These experiments encourage student involvement in the formulation of experimental design, promoting engagement in the learning process. These activities are suitable for both postsecondary education and high school classroom settings and highlight National Science Education Standards, particularly by promoting inquiry-based learning and communicating science explanations.

A fundamental component of science curricula is the understanding of scientific inquiry. Although recent trends favor using student inquiry to learn concepts through hands-on activities, it is often unclear to students where the line is drawn between the content and the process of science. This activity explicitly introduces students to the processes of science and allows the classroom to become a scientific community where independent studies are performed, shared, and revised. We designed this activity to be relatively independent of the chosen content, allowing instructors to utilize the presented framework for classes of various disciplines and education levels.

In this practice-based lab, students are provided with four Olympic athlete profiles and simulated blood and urine samples to test for illegal substances and blood-doping practices. Throughout the course of the lab, students design and conduct a testing procedure and use their results to determine which athletes won their medals fairly. All of the materials, which simulate the blood, urine, and testing compounds, are available at the grocery store. This real-world problem engages students to think about blood doping, hormones associated with red-blood-cell production, and detection techniques employed by the World Anti-Doping Agency. The Olympics, as well as the news coverage of Lance Armstrong’s admission to blood doping in 2013, makes this lab more relevant to students’ lives, which is supported by our students’ reactions to the lab.

This simple inquiry-based lab was designed to teach the principle of osmosis while also providing an experience for students to use the skills and practices commonly found in science. Students first design their own experiment using very basic equipment and supplies, which generally results in mixed, but mostly poor, outcomes. Classroom “talk and argument” is then used to determine how their experiments could be changed to gather more reliable data. The final assessment consists of both formal and subjective testing, requiring students to explain their design choices.

Students need practice in proposing hypotheses, developing experiments that will test these hypotheses, and generating data that they will analyze to support or refute them. I describe a guided-inquiry activity based on the “tongue map” concept, appropriate for middle school and high school students.

This bioacoustics activity combines concepts in invertebrate taxonomy, animal communication, and acoustical physics while providing a unique opportunity for physics and biology teachers to collaborate and introduce their students to an exciting, interdisciplinary research field. Here, we propose a lab- and field-based activity that uses hydrophones to explore how shrimp snapping behavior changes in response to different stimuli and introduces students to the process of scientific inquiry. Using free software, students use spectrograms to visualize and analyze their experimental data. Furthermore, we propose potential modifications to the lab for classrooms without easy access to marine environments or snapping shrimp.

Guided-inquiry lab activities with bean beetles ( Callosobruchus maculatus ) teach students how to develop hypotheses, design experiments, identify experimental variables, collect and interpret data, and formulate conclusions. These activities provide students with real hands-on experiences and skills that reinforce their understanding of the scientific method and experimental design. This teaching method can easily be adapted to other test organisms or alternative themes.

Implementation of a guided-inquiry lab in introductory biology classes, along with scaffolded instruction, improved students’ understanding of the scientific method, their ability to design an experiment, and their identification of experimental variables. Pre- and postassessments from experimental versus control sections over three semesters showed that most students improved in their understanding of the scientific method and experimental design skills. Students exhibited improvement in their ability to create hypotheses and correctly identify controls and dependent variables. However, students in both groups struggled with the identification of independent variable and controlled variables.

Students are provided with a mystery concerning dogs that are paralyzed. This motivates a laboratory exercise to measure parameters from the dog’s “blood” to determine whether the paralysis is due to pesticide poisoning or an autoimmune attack on nerve myelin. Most of the materials are available from the grocery store. The real-world nature of the problem, and the mystery, engages the students in thinking about nerve, muscle, and immune system function. Alternative versions require less familiarity with physiology and can be used as engagement activities to encourage learning laboratory skills and experimental design or as motivation for learning nerve and muscle physiology.

Many animals direct assistance selectively toward relatives and/or aggression toward non-relatives; the ability to differentiate between kin and non-kin should evolve when doing so incurs fitness benefits. We detail a field-based experiment that tests whether workers of a large-bodied, abundant, and hardy seed-harvester ant are capable of kin recognition. We use this exercise in an undergraduate animal-behavior class to introduce concepts associated with eusocial insects and the study of kin recognition, as well as to reinforce principles of hypothesis testing, experimental design, and scientific writing. Students collect data, analyze and interpret results, and write a formal report; this experiment is one of several we use as models to prepare students for designing and performing their own follow-up studies.

We describe a simple field study that we have found useful in introducing students to experimental design. Students manipulate the nutritive gain available from flowers to test the hypothesis that the foraging behavior of nectarivorous insects maximizes energy gain rate. They add sucrose solution to some flowers and water to others; additional flowers are left unmanipulated. Visit durations of foraging butterflies are then measured to test the prediction that individuals will forage longer at patches that offer higher energy gains. The project encourages students to consider how a study's design influences the results obtained, and helps to develop scientific reasoning skills.

The media will likely be a major source of science information after college for nonscience majors. It is thus essential that all students learn to critically read newspaper/Internet science. I have adapted the CREATE approach, an active-learning method originally designed for close reading of journal articles ( Hoskins et al., 2007 ), for use with a newspaper article written for the general public. The analysis challenges students to read closely, learn to represent data and design experiments, and think creatively about scientific issues and their social implications. The approaches outlined here can be adapted to any scientific reading and analysis.