| Abstract | In 1996, the National Science Foundation reported that most undergraduate science courses in the United States did not allow students to participate in authentic scientific inquiry. One way to address this problem is through inquiry-based classroom learning. Through inquiry-based learning, students must make observations, define a question, gather evidence, and then synthesize and communicate findings. A potential benefit of inquiry-based learning is that it may help students self-identify as scientists. Working with a professor and students in a 3000-level biology course at Cornell University, we investigated whether inquiry-based learning can encourage students to self-identify as scientists. We created an inquiry activity where we asked students to evaluate the likelihood that fish from the local aquarium store would be able to establish a population in the local lake. Half of students in the class participated in the inquiry-based activity, and half participated in an alternative activity that was not inquiry-based. On the last day of class, we surveyed all students. Compared to students that participated in the alternate activity, students that participated in the inquiry-based activity showed stronger agreement with the statements, “I participated in a scientific investigation”, “I collected my own data to support my findings”, and “doing this activity made me feel like a scientist”. Our experiment provides evidence that inquiry-based activities can help students self-identify as scientists. |
