For undergraduates who have the opportunity to do high-level research, the experience can be unforgettable. Paris Stowers, who took Wessler’s course at the University of Georgia, says the class was one of the most influential of her college career. “We were guided through the process of designing an experiment, writing a grant proposal, and presenting the results.” The class cemented her plans to pursue a career in medical research. Starting in September, Stowers will spend a year conducting research on neuroblastoma through Baylor College of Medicine’s medical student research track program.

Ownership and Discovery

Rich Losick believes that labs and classrooms have the potential to work symbiotically for students—and professors. “For me, teaching and research go hand in hand, and I’d like to think I’m a better teacher for being a researcher and vice versa,” he says. “It leads me to see the big picture and get to the heart of the matter.”

Losick spearheaded the design of the new science learning spaces with help from HHMI professor grants, starting in 2002. His aim was to move away from formulaic science teaching where students go through the motions without really learning. “There are two features that make for a successful hands-on experiment: ownership and discovery,” he says, adding that science is not just a series of facts but an active process.

Of course, designing courses so that every student can discover something novel is not easy. Losick has created two teaching spaces to take on the challenge. The Jeremy Knowles Teaching Lab, which opened at Harvard in December 2009, is a highly flexible space that can accommodate different science classes, from molecular biology to a new course on the science of cooking.

Around 120 students can simultaneously use the 7,000-square-foot laboratory for the research component of different lecture courses, thanks to engineering tricks like moveable benches and a false floor that serves different equipment. The space can be divided up with sound-proof walls, creating two or four smaller spaces. In this setting, rote-learning science labs are out and true experiments are in: small teams of undergrads tackle a semester-long project. One course, for example, trains students to work with a protein implicated in cancer and then has them look for other proteins involved.

The second space Losick designed is a 50-person, interdisciplinary laboratory used solely for research-based classes. In one project, students built their own confocal microscope and then used it to study neuronal firing in zebrafish. In another project, students studied samples of cheese from a gourmet store, identifying microbes in the cheese and rinds. “The projects are changing all the time, and the course is entirely devoted to research,” says Losick. “It’s like working in a real lab with a team of five or six students who are tackling some question of current research.”

Back at Riverside, Susan Wessler would love to see the model of project-based science classes grow—for the students and for slightly more selfish reasons. “When we started, I thought that we’d be bringing ideas from my research lab to the classroom, to design and deconstruct complex projects to their fundamentals. But I’ve been surprised that the learning goes both ways—some of the user-friendly computer software we’ve developed in the classroom has moved back to my research lab,” she says. “The lesson is: if you teach students what’s out there in science and give them the right tools, they can do real experiments.” And she’s betting they’re making discoveries for life.

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