Using computers to enhance inquiry process skills in the undergraduate physiology laboratory.

Considerable evidence demonstrates that inquiry‐based physiology laboratories improve students’ critical and analytical thinking skills. Through funding from an NSF‐ CCLI grant, we have recently acquired new computer‐based lab equipment. This equipment has been an important step in our abilities to engage student in inquiry, particularly in our non‐majors human anatomy and physiology courses. In these courses, our students have begun to explore physiological problems through a novel lab assessment called “inquiry‐based challenges”. These challenge activities allow students to develop and test their own hypotheses within the context of a specific problem. Challenges require student groups to develop testable hypotheses, design experiments using familiar techniques, collect and analyze data, and draw conclusions from the results. For example, student groups investigate the effects of music on the galvanic skin response based on a paper by VanderArk and Ely (Percept Mot Skills. 1992 74(3 Pt 2):1079–90). These activities are evaluated positively when students demonstrate appropriate inquiry process skills, not for the “correct” results. Challenges have been used as a performance‐based assessment in our introductory biology labs and, at the end of the semester, student responses to a self assessment questionnaire indicate that over 90% consider the challenge assessments an effective way to help them learn the processes that scientists use to explore problems. (This research is supported by NSF grant 0509161.)