Public Release:  Science magazine prize goes to undergrad course that incorporates faculty research

Format has been shown to boost engagement in science and enthusiasm for experimentation

American Association for the Advancement of Science

A Stanford biology class that involves undergraduates in their instructors' research and has been shown to engage students much more effectively than standard lab classes has been awarded the Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction (IBI).

"Teaching and research don't have to be either-or," says the Stanford assistant professor of biology Tadashi Fukami, who teaches the class. "Even if faculty professors are expected to be doing research and are really busy with that, they can do inquiry-based teaching combined with research in the area of science that they are good at. That can be a great combination."



Fukami was exposed to conventional "cookbook" labs, where students re-create experiments with known outcomes, in high school and college in Japan and was unimpressed. Luckily, he had a high school biology teacher who thought it was important for students to know the natural history of where they live. The teacher devoted a part of each class to teaching his students about the plants and wildlife in the environment around the school. Fukami, who grew up just outside of Tokyo but had loved exploring nature at his grandparents' house in the country, felt his childhood curiosity reinvigorated.

"That reminded me of how much I liked being outside and catching insects when I was little," he says.

Hired at Stanford in 2008, Fukami was intrigued by the idea of combining teaching and research so that they could be mutually beneficial, a concept advocated by Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning staff. Meanwhile, Stanford's biology department had begun an effort to bring inquiry-based instruction--that is, curriculum involving real research--to its undergraduate classes. During that process, a survey of recent graduates showed that the cookbook-style lab classes were the department's least popular classes.

"The classes were about following the manual, not creative or inspiring," Fukami says.

Fukami and his colleagues initiated an inquiry-based class in which students could design their own experiments based on Fukami's area of research--in this case, the ecological interactions between a species of flowering plant, hummingbirds and insect pollinators, and the microorganisms that inhabit the floral nectar of the plants and "hitchhike" from flower to flower on the pollinators. Interestingly, the biology department continued the traditional lab exercise classes for two years, as the new class was implemented.



"The students come to realize that science is a trial-and-error process," says Fukami, "that it's okay to have failure. They just have to keep working with the data and reformulate their questions."


Toward the end of the class involving authentic research, Fukami says, the students were apt to engage in animated discussion, sometimes hashing out differences in the results they had gotten. "This gets them thinking about science as collaborative," Fukami says. "Often you get better results if you critique each other."

Almost incidental to the overarching goal of allowing students to conduct real research and "feel" how science works, many of the student-designed experiments have yielded actual discoveries. For example, the students collected data on the relationship between nectar pH and microbial abundance, and those data were used in peer-reviewed papers and credited to the students, an accomplishment that Science Associate Editor Melissa McCartney credits to the authentic, hands-on nature of the class.

"The best way to learn is by doing," says McCartney. "In this educational module, students are participating in experiments at the leading edge of the field and making real contributions to relevant and open-ended questions."

As a recipient of the IBI prize, Fukami hopes that other university researchers will read his essay in Science and adopt similar approaches to their teaching. "You don't have to sacrifice the quality of your instruction because of your research. You can combine the two," he says. "My experience leaves me optimistic that inquiry-based instruction can become widespread through integration of teaching with faculty research programs."


