Reaching Students with Different Learning Styles and Creating a "Sense of Wonder"

There is one thing that that seem like the biggest barrier to students when learning science. Students often say they are not "science" people or they are "not good at science." It is my personal opinion that there is truly no human that is "bad" at science. We cannot be bad at science, because science is what we do everyday throughout our lives! We are constantly testing hypothesis, performing experiments, and asking why. Find any toddler and you will see he or she is a natural scientist. Now the experiments might include pouring water into mom's purse or eating lipstick, but nonetheless, they are experiments.

How do we keep that sense of wonder in teaching science? My proposal is to try a myriad of teaching modalities that allow students to access science in a visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sense. Students should access science through images, sounds, and touch. Humans are naturally curious about the world, so as instructors the job is to nurture curiosity and strengthen it. Therefore classroom activities should be designed to utilize all of types of learning to reach all students in the class.

In order to test my ideas, I would create two test groups of students. One group would have a traditionally learning experience (lectures and textbook readings) and the other group would participate in an alternative format with videos, lectures, textbook, and hands on activities. Following the end of the course I would look at the results of both test and quiz grades as well as the results of a student satisfaction survey. It is my hypothesis that students that students who had access to the varied modalities would perform better and have an overall better experience.