LEARNING TO FAIL: AN EXPERIENTIAL RESEARCH PROJECT THAT EXPOSES UNIVERSITY FRESHMEN TO THE PROCESS OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY AND REASONING

In any university science education, students are often given laboratory-based practical classes training with "a tried and tested" protocol, leading them to a defined experimental or learning outcome. However, as experimental outcomes are already known, students are never challenged to think about how scientific experiments are used to answer specific research questions, let alone develop their skill in hypothesis formulation and experimental design. Project-based laboratory learning can bridge this gap in science education. For my module, "The Cell", I use a simple organism Physarum polycephalum (slime mould) to develop a project based laboratory class for science undergraduate enrolled in the Special programme in Science, NUS. The stages in this project-based laboratory exercise mimic the scientific enquiry process that scientist goes through when they start a new research project, including reviewing the literature, coming up with a research question, design and execution of experiments and the analysis of the significance of the experimental data. Students working on this project can have their creative input in investigating their chosen hypothesis and at the same time expose them to the process of scientific discovery.