Undergraduate laboratory courses, owing to their larger sizes and shorter time slots, are often conducted in highly structured modes. However, this approach is known to interfere with students' engagement in the experiments. To enhance students' engagement, we propose an alternative mode of running laboratory courses by creating some “disorder” in a previously adopted structure. After performing an experiment in the right way, the students were asked to repeat the experiment but with a variation at certain steps leading to the experiment being done the “wrong” way. Although this approach led to fewer experiments being conducted in a semester, it significantly enhanced the students' involvement. This was also reflected in the students' feedback. The majority of students preferred repeating an experiment with a variant protocol than performing a new experiment. Although we have tested this inquiry‐based approach only for an undergraduate laboratory course in molecular biology, we believe such an approach could also be extended to undergraduate laboratory courses of other subjects.

中文翻译：

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大型本科实验室中基于探究的方法：通过“错误”的方式学习

本科实验室课程由于规模较大、时间段较短，通常以高度结构化的模式进行。然而，众所周知，这种方法会干扰学生对实验的参与。为了提高学生的参与度，我们提出了一种通过在以前采用的结构中制造一些“混乱”来运行实验室课程的替代模式。在以正确的方式进行实验后，学生们被要求重复实验，但在某些步骤上有所不同，导致实验以“错误”的方式进行。虽然这种方法导致在一个学期内进行的实验较少，但它显着提高了学生的参与度。这也反映在学生的反馈中。大多数学生更喜欢用不同的协议重复实验而不是进行新的实验。尽管我们仅针对分子生物学本科实验室课程测试了这种基于探究的方法，但我们相信这种方法也可以扩展到其他学科的本科实验室课程。