Written by Dr. Jason Keller
In my own educational journey I learned about science in large part by following recipes. Laboratory experiments in high school involved reading directions, making careful measurements, and ensuring that I did things “right”. This was a wonderful start to my journey, but I realize now that it wasn’t really science.
Science is more than following a recipe in laboratory notebook to prove that you can get the expected results. At its heart, science is about discovering something that no one else in the world knows. This is what I hope students at Chapman University get to see for themselves.
In my Ecosystems Ecology course (BIOL319) students work on a semester-long project that asks a question about soil carbon storage in restored salt marshes in Huntington Beach. We trek to the field, we collect soils, we return to campus covered in mud and we make measurements and analyze our data. My experience in this course suggests that students struggle with the idea that they don’t know the answer to the question at the start of the semester. Of course they don’t (and, to be fair, I don’t know the answer either). If we knew what was going to happen we wouldn’t be working on an interesting question, we wouldn’t be doing interesting science, we would be cooking. Students in this course work together to get past this discomfort and discover something that no one else knows – this is powerful and exciting and (I hope) fun. You can read more about our past efforts, and we have a second manuscript currently in press.
This is my expectation for students at Chapman. I want you to ask questions that no one else has asked, I want you to discover something new. I expect more than just following a recipe, I expect you to do science.
Dr. Jason K. Keller
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