The Bush Grant is Working

by Bob Werner

In this and the next issue of Synergia, I would like to present the hardest evidence we have that the Bush Foundation grant is working. The objective of the grant is to raise students’ higher-order thinking skills through Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) and faculty/student collaboration. In this issue, I will discuss IBL in a required introductory Philosophy Core course. In the next issue, I will present results of using IBL in an introductory Computer Science course.

A Bush grant was awarded to four faculty members of the Philosophy Department in the summer of 2003: Michael Degnan, Steve Laumakis, Gordon Barnes and Mark Discher. The four faculty members hypothesized that if PHIL 115 students (Philosophy of the Human Person) were taught to identify and apply tools used in philosophical reasoning, that students would improve their general higher-order thinking skills. (The specific set of thinking skills included: ability to distinguish valid from invalid arguments, as well as abilities to detect informal fallacies and assess causal explanations). The profs thought that students would better be able to evaluate new arguments they have not encountered, thereby thinking more independently. Students would have transferable skills to use in other courses, including non-Philosophy courses. The four profs designed instruction that taught the reasoning skills, then devised IBL problems for students. Students were expected to apply their new thinking skills throughout the course.

Using IBL methods, four different professors taught four sections of the course (126 students). Another four sections of the course (129 students) were taught by three different professors using “traditional,” or non-IBL approaches.

At the end of the course, the four professors who taught the IBL sections conducted oral interviews of 32 randomly chosen students, in order to assess students’ higher-order thinking skills. They gave each student a four-page article about whether nature or nurture was responsible for men having more sexual partners than women along with the set of questions the profs would ask in the interview. This article posed a new problem that was not used in PHIL 115. Students had 15 minutes alone to read the article and think about it, then they spent 30 minutes being interviewed by two of the professors. The professors did not interview their own students. Professors then rated students’ higher-order thinking skills with a given scoring rubric and a set of rules about how to ask the questions.

Students’ higher-order thinking skills, as rated by the four professors, were significantly better if they took the IBL course. In an independent-samples t-test, p=.003 (df=24). (This result means that the chances are three out of a thousand that the profs’ ratings would be obtained if in fact there was no difference in students’ thinking skills.

The results of this quasi-experiment confirm that students in sections where professors used IBL strategies had better general reasoning skills than students who had received traditional instruction.