home - login - register

PERC 2021 Abstract Detail Page

Previous Page  |  New Search  |  Browse All

Abstract Title: Student ownership and understanding of multi-week final projects
Abstract: 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.
Abstract Type: Contributed Poster Presentation
Session Time: Poster Session 1 Room C
Poster Number: 1C-12
Contributed Paper Record: Contributed Paper Information
Contributed Paper Download: Download Contributed Paper

Author/Organizer Information

Primary Contact: Ira Ché Lassen
Western Washington University
Bellingham, WA 98225
Phone: 5098856961
Co-Author(s)
and Co-Presenter(s)
Acacia Arielle-Evans, Western Washington University
Laura Ríos, California Polytechnic State University
H.  J.  Lewandowski, University of Colorado Boulder
Dimitri Dounas-Frazer, Western Washington University