gms | German Medical Science

Background: Assistant professors in the health sciences (108 participants from biomedicine, clinical medicine, dentistry, sports, nursing and public health) submitted their teaching portfolio as part of the requirement for a pedagogical course for university teachers at Aarhus University, Denmark. The course introduced participants to concepts and methods to create constructive alignment and activating teaching and to a teaching portfolio as a means of reflecting upon inquiry and teaching.

Design: This study investigated assistant professors espoused beliefs about the role of scientific inquiry in teaching and supervision of students. The study was a discourse analysis of participants’ written portfolios (each 1-10 pages).

Results: Scientific inquiry was constructed by participants as a means to increase students’ motivation (e.g. to pursue a scientific career), emotions (e.g. curiosity) or as a mean to increase students’ deep learning. A large group of participants took a disciplinary stand to inquiry: They saw the laboratory as an important site of learning inquiry in biomedicine or they taught about scientific findings in order to translate findings from biomedicine to clinical medicine. A small group of participants expressed the view that students need meta-cognitive skills to develop scientific inquiry. Furthermore, they subscribed to a minimally guided inquiry model whereby students should learn to question their own findings. Even fewer participants perceived of scientific inquiry in terms of a more systematic approach to higher-level thinking. Thus although participants cited one or more constructivist educational theorists, they did not express a well-articulated notion of inquiry and they provided limited concrete examples on how to design a conducive learning environment around inquiry or critical thinking.

Discussion: The value of this study is that it might enable educational developers to give junior faculty better guidance on teaching and specific feedback on their teaching portfolio in particular in regards to the design of learning activities that might use scientific inquiry as means and end in higher education.