Student-Driven Research in the First Year: Building Science Skills and Creating Community

Abstract

We designed the Integrated Sciences First-Year Program (ISFP) to introduce students to the nature andprocess of science early in their academic career, help them develop skills and competencies, and create an intellectual community of learners to foster belonging within science. Using their inherent curiosity, we designed active learning environments where students were provided with enough scaffolding to guide their efforts, but enough freedom to engage in authentic research and experience both success and failure while taking academic risks. We found that student-driven inquiry projects, formal and informal mentoring experiences, and engagement with a larger scientific community constituted the key program elements that enabled us to meet our goals, while better preparing students to design and complete their college majors and capstone projects and engage with the broader scientific community. While we implemented the ISFP as a three-part series during students’ first year of college, the lessons we learned are widely applicable and can be applied to individual courses as well as within courses across a science curriculum.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina Cianfrani

Christina Cianfrani ([email protected]) is director of the Teaching and Learning Initiative and professor of hydrology, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Sarah Hews

Sarah Hews is associate professor of mathematics, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Christene DeJong

Christene DeJong is research project manager at the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical SchoolBaystate in Springfield, Massachusetts.