It's where you have a chance to create hypotheses and follow them up on site. Having undergraduates participate in the summer institute is a new approach. By reversing this order you make good friends early in your undergraduate career and you stay together until graduation three or four years later. This gives students more confidence early in their careers and greatly helps open up classroom discussions. We want to teach students to question and think using the Socratic method.
Most educators seem to think that inquiry-based learning is much more effective than memorization.
But it's hard to change from the lecture-based format to one that focuses on the process used to get to the answer or solve the problem. We feel that if we can get teachers to incorporate these course ideas into their own programs, it will facilitate the implementation of this new process.