written by Xueli Zou

To help students develop the scientific abilities desired in the 21st century workplace, four different types of student design tasks--observation, verification, application, and investigation experiments--have been developed and implemented in our calculus-based introductory courses. Students working in small groups are engaged in designing and conducting their own experiments to observe some physical phenomena, test a physical principle, build a real-life device, solve a complex problem, or conduct an open-inquiry investigation. A preliminary study has shown that, probed by a performance-based task, the identified scientific abilities are more explicitly demonstrated by design-lab students than non- design lab students. In this paper, detailed examples of the design tasks and assessment results will be reported.

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Published November 12, 2007
Last Modified December 1, 2010

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