Thus, you will be responsible for planning the experiment, analyzing and interpreting the results, and forming a conclusion. After completing a project, each group will make an oral presentation and submit a 5-6 page paper about the results. Changing Expectations for this Course Most if not all of us have spent our entire academic career learning in a passive environment. The instructor's role in this learning process is to inform students on what to prepare for course exams and to organize the relevant information in a manner that facilitates the memorization process. This traditional style of learning prepares students to respond to fact-oriented questions, but it does not adequately prepare them to evaluate information or synthesis new information from existing data.
Students become adept at figuring out how to respond to exam questions.
However, when faced with the challenge of answering a more complex question, this learning style can lead to difficulties in developing an answer, analyzing data, or forming conclusions from the data. To address these concerns, this course is using an inquiry-based teaching strategy, and in doing so, is changing the traditional roles of the instructor and students. The students' role is now to be an active participant which means much more than merely collecting lab data and writing up results. Rather, you, working collaboratively with your research group, will have to first figure out how to conduct your experiment, analyze and summarize the data, and clearly present your findings. The instructor's role has also changed to focus on facilitating this process rather than simply imparting information.