ELD Conference 2018

Science courses have the benefit of scheduled laboratories to engage students. These sessions usually present a topic with recipe-based instructions and the expectation that students follow them to an expected experimental result. In some ways this is the opposite of the scientific process and misguides students' perceptions of scientific thought. At a highly diverse community college the 200-level microbiology laboratory was restructured to follow an inquiry-based framework where students design their own experiments. This refocusing enables each learner to explore the laboratory topics with personal interest and more closely mimics the actual scientific process.