Inquiry‐based ecology laboratory courses improve student confidence and scientific reasoning skills

Recently, the AAAS Vision and Change report renewed the push to incorporate inquiry throughout the biology curriculum. Even prior to the report, many ecology faculty have used inquiry‐based approaches in their laboratory and field courses. However, the efficacy of these approaches has been assessed only to a limited degree and often at a single institution. Therefore, whether one may generalize the results of previous studies of inquiry‐based teaching in laboratory courses is unclear. We examined the change in student confidence and scientific reasoning skills using published, validated instruments in inquiry‐based ecology laboratory courses at two different institutions (a historically black, all‐male, liberal arts college and a private research university) across multiple semesters. Students exhibited a significant increase in overall confidence and scientific reasoning skills with students in the lowest quartile at the beginning of the semester for each construct exhibiting a significantly greater gain in comparison to students in the highest quartile for the same construct. Institution had no effect on learning gains, indicating that the positive impact of inquiry‐based learning is general, at least for students at our two institutions. Although weaker students exhibited greater learning gains, significant differences in confidence and scientific reasoning skills between the lowest and highest quartile persisted at the end of the semester; thus, a single, inquiry‐based laboratory course is not sufficient to overcome initial differences among students. Interestingly, gains in confidence were not significantly correlated with gains in scientific reasoning with some weaker students increasing in confidence while their scientific reasoning skills decreased, which suggests that our inquiry‐based laboratories did not help these students develop important metacognitive skills. Overall, our results indicate that inquiry‐based laboratory courses in ecology can lead to significant learning gains, but that performance gaps among students might only be bridged by students taking multiple inquiry‐based courses.