Research projects at undergraduate courses: from observation to inquiry

Abstract

This paper seeks to analyze the final guided research projects of undergraduate botany students. This work has been focused on observational data, but we think that it should promote the inquiry competence. Therefore, a fraction of the student body was proposed to think a question to drive their investigation. Evaluation of final presentations with the assessment tools NPTAI and NCI showed that those students who had asked and answered an inquiry question reached higher levels of inquiry abilities as opposed to students that had not considered such question. Based on the simplicity of the implemented change and its impact on students, we propose to modify the traditional experimental practices including inquiry questions at their beginning.