Our aim has been to introduce student-centred research-led learning (RLL) into undergraduate practical classes for 2nd year Science students. We take an incremental approach to developing students’ generic skills of investigating scientists with many opportunities for them to practice and assess their own progress. The experimental design scenarios, and the skills we aim to engender, go
beyond simple inquiry-based learning in practical classes and get them to think about the bigger issues of research projects in real-world laboratories.

In Semester 1, Science practical physiology is taught with an emphasis on students learning the principles of experimental design. In Semester 2, students apply their experimental design capabilities in designing, executing, analysing and reporting on their investigation of a physiological problem as if it were to be published as a journal article. Our underlying approach for our practical class teaching is to have students form hypotheses, gather and analyse and interpret data and then review their hypotheses in light of their findings. It has been shown that such prediction-investigation-interpretation-reporting cycles are crucial to correct previous common misconceptions by students and student learning from the classes. We support students’ tasks associated with the RLL by online e-Learning activities which are normally predictive before any practical class or discussion workshop.

 Students then have opportunities to review their submissions before lectures in which the most important issues are raised using Personal Response Units to encourage active learning. Currently, we are using the University of Melbourne’s ‘Neo System’ because of its adaptability that allows us to deliver a wide range of engaging, highly-interactive and challenging learning activities on-line. In addition, Neo enables us to provide timely automatic or tutor feedback as students progress with a variety of tasks. These functionalities go far beyond what is currently available in standard Learning Management Systems, although we would like to see such advanced learning tools be developed as Blackboard Building Blocks or as Sakai add-ons.

Effective collaborations amongst U21 institutions could see development provide increased scalability, sustainability and spread of this model of Research Led Learning in science curricula.