Student ownership and understanding of multi-week final projects

TL;DR

This study explores how students develop ownership and understanding during multi-week final projects in lab courses, highlighting the evolving student-project relationship and offering strategies for instructors to foster ownership.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for understanding student ownership across project phases and compares it to community gardening, providing practical recommendations for educators.

Findings

Students' ownership evolves through project phases.

Ownership involves contributions, emotional responses, and understanding.

Recommendations for fostering ownership in lab courses.

Abstract

National calls to transform laboratory courses by making them more discovery-based can be met by engaging students in multi-week final projects. One plausible outcome of this approach is that students may feel ownership of their projects. We define ownership as a dynamic relationship between students and their projects characterized by three student-project interactions that evolve over three project phases. Student-project interactions include students' contributions to, emotional responses to, and new understanding of the project. Phases include choosing the topic and team, carrying out the research, and creating and presenting end-of-project deliverables. Drawing on interviews with students collected as part of a multi-year, multi-institutional study, this paper will elaborate on the evolution of students' own new knowledge about the project across different project phases. Throughout our work, we compare the type of ownership that manifests when students work on projects in a lab course to the type of ownership gardeners feel when tending to plots in a community garden. We end with recommendations for instructors wishing to foster project ownership in their lab courses.