rR > - OK Ke * “oN VOLUME XIII, NUMBER 16 : INNOVATION ABSTRACTS PUBLISHED BY THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (NISOD), COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, el eee elm Ce Me eke ane e 0 Mic a adteke cc) eNO VL ONE OMI ach a RICHARDSON FOUNDATION Thinking and Working Like a Scientist It is not unusual for students to take courses in which they learn about the products of scientific endeavors. At the University of Rhode Island, Honors students have had the opportunity to see how scientists actually work. “Thinking and Working Like a Scientist” was first offered as a special laboratory in a freshman zoology course, then expanded into a stand-alone Honors offering. It draws primarily science students, but there have been a scattering of business and humanities students as well. The catalog description of the course advises stu- dents that they should not enroll unless they feel comfortable working by themselves in ambiguous circumstances; in this way only students who will thrive in the decidedly free-form environment of the course bother to sign up. Each week of the course focuses on a personal attribute necessary for a scientist, and there is an exercise that will allow the students to demonstrate that attribute. Thus, we have an Initiative Week, Patience Week, Persistence Week, Logic Week, Creativity Week, Resistance to Rejection Week, Verbal Communications Week, Information Week, Written Communication Week, field trips to working scientific labs, and a Day with the Pros—in which the students work side-by-side with someone who makes his or her living as an ap- plied scientist. The core of the course is the Thought Log. The instant the students receive an assignment, which they usually draw by lot, because luck is an important component in science, they are expected to jot down in the Log what their first thoughts were about how they would solve the problem of an assignment. If that approach doesn’t work, or if they reject it before even starting on that line of direction, they are supposed to enter that information also in the Log. After the assign- ment is completed by all the students, we discuss the Logs to see what the thought process was that led to the speediest solution. The semester starts off in dramatic fashion with the Initiative Week. Scientists, especially newly minted ones, have to be scroungers and be willing to ask favors of people—to borrow equipment, share data, compare techniques, etc. In the first week, then, each student receives a scavenger hunt type of assignment. Ex- amples include, “Bring me exactly 100.00 grams of camel dung, dry weight.” Here the student has to somehow persuade the zoo to give him the material; then he has to find an oven and a balance. “Here is a length of yarn. It is very unusual. As a matter of fact, it can be found in only one place in the state of Rhode Island. Bring me another piece.” It took one student 16 hours; starting with the University’s textiles depart- ment, she identified the yarn, but then she had to figure out that if it could be found in only one place in Rhode Island, it had to be some kind of industrial yarn, rather than a home knitting yarn. Other initiative assignments include bringing in exactly 10 human white blood cells, without any red blood cells, filling a vial with hydrogen sulfide, and obtaining the signature of the governor of Rhode Island. Much of science involves repetitive work, a charac- teristic which does not appear on Jacques Cousteau or Carl Sagan programs. For the Patience lab, students are given a one-pound box of birdseed which contains three types of seeds. The assignment is to tell me, with an accuracy of five significant figures, what fraction of the whole is millet, canary, and oat seeds. To satisfy the requirement, the students have to somehow separate and then count all 74,000 seeds in the box. This assign- ment is fascinating, because the students immediately sort themselves out. Some phlegmatically get a camel’s hair brush, sit down, and have at it, emerging 20 hours later with the answer. Others say to themselves “no way,” and spend hours trying to devise some kind of mechanical separator, using sieves, fans, water, etc. In the postmortem of the exercise, the students say they hated it all the time, but found that it was the most revealing of all the exercises during the semester. The Resistance to Rejection assignment is not labeled as such. Scientists are always having to submit manu- scripts and grant proposals, and experiencing rejections, from which they must recover and try again. The students here are given a small library research paper which they are to submit to me. I return it to them with the comment, “This is no good. Try it again, but with more detail.” When they resubmit, I say, “Better, but PS