Megan McNulty is a Senior Instructional Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, and teaches general education biology courses for nonmajors as well as courses for neuroscience majors. She, along with Oscar Pineda-Catalan, co-led an effort to augment the Core Biology curriculum by including hands-on approaches to scientific research and habits of mind through student-designed research projects, which is now included in the Core curriculum for biology. Her recent courses include “Inquiry-Based Exploration of Biology,” “Workings of the Human Brain: From Brain to Behavior,” and “The Gut-Brain Axis.”
Oscar Pineda-Catalan is an Associate Senior Instructional Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division. Pineda-Catalan is a conservation biologist who has developed research and education programs to motivate and engage youth to pursue careers in science. His recent courses include “Inquiry-Based Exploration of Biology,” “Biodiversity” and “Human Genetics and Developmental Biology.”
Tell us about “Inquiry-Based Explorations of Biology.”
Inquiry-Based Exploration of Biology (BIOS 10140) fulfills one quarter of the Core requirement of at least two quarters of biology, at least one of which must have a lab component. Students in the class are pursuing a major outside of biology. Each section of the inquiry-based class focuses on a different Grand Challenge question in biology, usually within the instructor’s specialty. Oscar’s section focuses on biodiversity in the autumn quarter, nutrition and diversity of edible plants in the winter quarter, and students explore the biological diversity of Hyde Park. With Megan, students explore the genetic and neurobiological bases of behavior. Students also still have the option to take lecture/lab biology courses with our colleagues, which continue to be a valid way to learn biology.
How did inquiry-based learning help your students to accomplish the learning objectives in your courses?
With the inquiry-based approach, students in this course develop a project throughout the quarter, from conceptualization to carrying out an experiment. The goal is for students to learn about the process of establishing knowledge in biology by developing a research question, determining the best method(s) for answering that question, collecting observations and conducting experiments, collecting data, and analyzing and communicating results. They get to find out for themselves, with guidance, get practice identifying gaps in the field and what is and isn’t working in their experiments . In Megan’s courses, students might investigate the effect of light, drugs, genetic variations, or diet on sleep/wake behaviors or social behaviors in experimental model organisms. In Oscar’s, students might decide to explore the diversity of worms living in the Quad (fun fact: there are worms from four different continents there!).
What teaching challenge did you want to address by using inquiry-based learning?
Our goals have always been to teach students how science is done as well as basic concepts of biology. After receiving some student feedback which indicated that they didn’t always understand the relevance of the science they were learning, we wanted to offer another approach to learning biology and the scientific process. When re-designing, we wanted to keep in mind the diversity of students; in particular, their background in biology, their academic interests, and their prior learning experiences. Regardless of their background, the inquiry-based approach ensures that students learn something new in the class and build on their prior knowledge and experience with biology.
What did you do to prepare to put it into action in your class?
Implementing such an approach in some of the course sections took a great deal of time and preparation. We worked with the CCTL over several years. With the CCTL, we participated in a summer scientific teaching workshop a few years ago, and later reevaluated our learning objectives and began developing new assessment tools. We also took a summer workshop on backward design and read about different approaches to course design, which helped us settle on inquiry-based learning. In the early stages we talked a lot with one another about how things were going, even though our courses were different in content. We considered how and how much material to present to students, what to let them discover themselves, and how to work within the confines of the quarter system. We were also grateful to have received a College Curricular Innovation grant to hold regular workshops, facilitated by the CCTL, among all the instructors in this sequence where we agreed on learning objectives, and we regularly checked on how the sequence was going for everyone and discussed challenges we were all facing.
What is working well about what you’re doing? Why do you think it’s working?
Students are often quite engaged when working on their projects and experience a sense of ownership with their learning, because they get to explore their own ideas and curiosities. They get to bring in their own disciplinary backgrounds as they shape the direction of their projects. They’re able to present the implications of their projects and share about their experimental processes with the class at the end of the quarter, which is really exciting for everyone. We hear a lot from students that they’re surprised they can do research like this. They may think of research as something that’s done in a far-off lab, but we communicate to them that they’re doing exactly the same kind of work and using the same kinds of methods as other researchers. They recognize that their work is on a smaller scale, but this approach closes the gap between them and the scientific community, making science more accessible.
We’ve also been able to renovate a lab space to support inquiry-based learning, too, and we’ve been able to pilot a subset of inquiry-based sections in that space. It’s flexible and can be converted into a lab space or a lecture hall because the furniture is adjustable. We can move tables so students can work in groups and students can use whiteboards to plan their experiments. It’s also much easier now to interact with students when they hold their small group meetings.
Tell us a bit about your experience working together to develop and teach with this approach. What were the benefits and challenges, for you and for students, of collaborating on teaching and course design?
It’s been a very positive experience teaching this course together. We serve as points of reference for one another, even though we have different professional backgrounds. Megan brings her expertise as the biology undergraduate advisor and Oscar brings innovative ideas about course design and implementation. We troubleshoot with and call on each other when we have a teaching problem. We’ve also expanded our collaboration across several instructional professors now teaching in this part of the curriculum. It’s great to see how our Core sequence can have such a diversity in topics but still meet the same fundamental learning objectives.
Further Reading
Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2022). Designing for inquiry-based learning in undergraduate science and engineering lab courses. Columbia University. Retrieved July 7, 2025 from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/designing-for-inquiry-based-learning-science-engineering/
Pedaste, M., Mäeots, M., Siiman, L. A., de Jong, T., van Riesen, S. A. N., Kamp, E. T., Manoli, C. C., Zacharia, Z. C., & Tsourlidaki, E. (2015). Phases of inquiry-based learning: Definitions and the inquiry cycle. Educational Research Review 14, 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2015.02.003