Designing an Extended Discretion Laboratory Investigation

Abstract

WOULD YOU LIKE TO create your own biology laboratory activities that require the students to think out part of the procedure themselves through the exercise of discretion? Are you interested in training your students to deal with uncertainty in the laboratory yet still develop basic biological concepts? The Extended Discretion (ED) laboratory approach was described in a recent article (Leonard 1980). The article explained the development of the ED approach as a result of research at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California at Berkeley. The original article also presents a description of the concept of extended discretion laboratory learning, relationship to learning theory in science education, and a study where the method was shown to be productive for high school biology students. This article outlines a step-by-step procedure for the biology teacher to design and conduct an extended discretion laboratory activity and it gives a detailed example, lists expected teacher and student behaviors, and discusses the control of student discretion over the school year. The basic idea behind the ED approach is that students are required to exercise discretion in the use of available resources during the laboratory activity instead of merely following a recipe-like procedure. Because the approach fosters student independence, it has some similarities to biology teaching strategies previously characterized as deductive (Curtis 1950), enquiry (Schwab 1954), discovery (Bruner 1969), and nondirective (Egleston 1973). The ED approach is different from these other approaches in that there are only specified times at which a student can receive teacher assistance (review points), and there is a systematic attempt to control and account for the period of time a student is required to work with-