Taking practical learning in STEM education home: Examples from do-it-yourself experiments in plant biology.

Ragnhild Gya,Anne Elisabeth Bjune

doi:10.1002/ece3.7207

Abstract

Practical teaching can give authentic learning experiences and teach valuable skills for undergraduate students in the STEM disciplines. One of the main ways of giving students such experiences, laboratory teaching, is met with many challenges such as budget cuts, increased use of virtual learning, and currently the university lockdowns due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. We highlight how at‐home do‐it‐yourself (DIY) experiments can be a good way to include physical interaction with your study organism, system, or technique to give the students a practical, authentic learning experience. We hope that by outlining the benefits of a practical, at‐home, DIY experiment we can inspire more people to design these teaching activities in the current remote teaching situation and beyond. By contributing two examples in the field of plant biology we enrich the database on experiments to draw inspiration from for these teaching methods.

Highlights

Practice and practical activities in education provide considerable positive influence on the learning and motivation of students (Brownell et al, 2012; Easton & Gilburn, 2012; Hole, 2017; Lave, 1996; White et al, 2002)
The positive effects of practical learning all depend on the pedagogical quality of the activities, and how the students process the new knowledge they obtain through this teaching
Virtual laboratories are one option, and these already exist for some STEM disciplines such as microbiology (Makransky et al, 2019), human anatomy (Sorgo et al, 2008), molecular biology (White et al, 2002), physics (Finkelstein et al, 2005; Olympiou & Zacharia, 2012), chemistry (Guarracino, 2020), and ecology (Wu et al, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

Practice and practical activities in education provide considerable positive influence on the learning and motivation of students (Brownell et al, 2012; Easton & Gilburn, 2012; Hole, 2017; Lave, 1996; White et al, 2002). Practical learning experiences provide opportunities to engage multiple senses as you touch, smell and observe a study object or phenomenon, which creates a new way of knowing the theory by increased sensory and cognitive activity (Nabors et al, 2009; Willis, 2007) By including both vision, hearing, touch, and smell the students can link the knowledge to several parts of the brain, and this makes it easier to find that knowledge again later (Willis, 2007). Replacing all in-person labs with virtual laboratories, for example due to COVID-19 campus lockdown, could negatively affect student learning outcomes in STEM subjects

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