| Abstract | We developed instructional materials for the 3-week capstone module - Global Climate Change - in a new course (ILS153-Ways of Knowing) that fulfills a general science requirement for UW-Madison non-science majors. The course’s integrative, process-based approach explores scientific inquiry and discovery by studying paradigm shifts in five major scientific fields: heliocentrism, plate tectonics, radioactivity, evolutionary biology, and global climate change. This approach exposes students to scientific content and process and to the social context in which science takes place (‘nature of science’, or NOS). Our research explores whether including NOS increases learning gains for non-science majors. Here we examine results from two hands-on labs: Statistics and Scientific Uncertainty, and Simulation as a Way of Knowing. Only the Statistics and Scientific Uncertainty Lab had an NOS component. Final assessment results showed that students performed significantly better on the scientific uncertainty question than on the simulation question (paired t-test, p-value <0.01). We also analyzed students’ pre- and post-test responses when asked to list 3-5 questions they would ask before accepting an extraordinary scientific claim. Because student’s responses were multivariate, we used Multiple Response Permutation Procedures to assess whether pre- and post-test responses differed significantly (a measure of learning gains, A-value = 0.05, p-value <0.001). We used Indicator Species Analysis to show that the largest contributory factor to increased learning was the inclusion of “uncertainty” in student’s post-test response (p-value <0.01), suggesting that the inclusion of NOS in the Uncertainty Lab increased student’s ability to assess a scientific claim. In addition, pre- and post-test results show that selfrated concern over anthropogenic global warming increased significantly after the module (paired t-test, p-value <0.001). |
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