Research Mentor(s)
Kevin Delucio
Description
National calls to transform laboratory courses by making them more discovery based can be met by engaging students in multi-week final projects. One plausible outcome of this approach is that students may feel ownership of their projects. We define ownership as a dynamic relationship between students and their projects characterized by three student-project interactions that evolve over three project phases. Student-project interactions include students’ contributions to, emotional responses to, and new understanding of the project. Phases include choosing the topic and team, carrying out the research, and creating and presenting end-of-project deliverables. Drawing on interviews with students collected as part of a multi-year, multi-institutional study, this paper will elaborate on the evolution of students’ own new knowledge about the project across different project phases. Throughout our work, we compare the type of ownership that manifests when students work on projects in a lab course to the type of ownership gardeners feel when tending to plots in a community garden. We end with recommendations for instructors wishing to foster project ownership in their lab courses.
Document Type
Event
Start Date
May 2022
End Date
May 2022
Location
Carver Gym (Bellingham, Wash.)
Department
CSE - Physics and Astronomy
Genre/Form
student projects; posters
Type
Image
Rights
Copying of this document in whole or in part is allowable only for scholarly purposes. It is understood, however, that any copying or publication of this document for commercial purposes, or for financial gain, shall not be allowed without the author’s written permission.
Language
English
Format
application/pdf
Student ownership and understanding of multi-week final projects
Carver Gym (Bellingham, Wash.)
National calls to transform laboratory courses by making them more discovery based can be met by engaging students in multi-week final projects. One plausible outcome of this approach is that students may feel ownership of their projects. We define ownership as a dynamic relationship between students and their projects characterized by three student-project interactions that evolve over three project phases. Student-project interactions include students’ contributions to, emotional responses to, and new understanding of the project. Phases include choosing the topic and team, carrying out the research, and creating and presenting end-of-project deliverables. Drawing on interviews with students collected as part of a multi-year, multi-institutional study, this paper will elaborate on the evolution of students’ own new knowledge about the project across different project phases. Throughout our work, we compare the type of ownership that manifests when students work on projects in a lab course to the type of ownership gardeners feel when tending to plots in a community garden. We end with recommendations for instructors wishing to foster project ownership in their lab courses.