Published Freshman Lab Exercises as Indicators of Awareness and Adoption of Instructional Practices Grounded in Discipline-Based Education Research

The discipline-based education research (DBER) report from the National Research Council (2012) highlighted the existence of a research-practice gap in science instruction in higher education and the need to identify strategies to close it. This study hypothesizes that one potential factor is instructors’ access to research-based instructional materials. This investigation aims to (a) characterize the extent to which one type of instructional materials, laboratories published in practitioner-oriented DBER journals, has the potential to promote readers’ awareness of instructional practices supported by education research, and (b) determine the relationship between authors’ awareness of educational literature and their adoption of these practices. Freshman-level laboratories from biochemistry, biology, chemistry, and physics were analyzed for level of inquiry and type of authors (DBER, science, or teaching faculty). Results indicate that a majority of the articles analyzed have low levels of inquiry and that there was no relationship between type of author and the level of inquiry of the laboratory.