by Dr. Kaci Thompson
Director, Undergraduate Research and Internship Programs, College of Chemical and Life Sciences

UNIV 100 (The Student in the University), required of freshmen in the College of Chemical and Life Sciences, introduces students to campus resources and strategies for academic success. The class typically centers on in-class discussions and workshops, and it can be a challenge to consider the more complex and sensitive topics in a way that is not superficial.

To address this challenge, I developed a WebQuest to facilitate a class discussion of diversity and ethics. WebQuests are structured, inquiry-based projects that are frequently used in K-12 teaching. They were developed in 1995 at San Diego State University, which maintains an extensive library of WebQuests. Key elements of a WebQuest are:

• A specific task that students will undertake, usually framed as a question;
  
  
• Some guidance as to the process that students will use to answer this question;
  
  
• A list of Internet resources that students should consult; and
  
  
• A framework for processing this information that allows for analysis and synthesis.

In addition to these basic features, WebQuests often incorporate group work and role playing (e.g., having different groups of students examine a particular topic from differing perspectives, giving each group a different set of Internet resources to examine).

For my class, which consisted largely of pre-medical students, my aim was to encourage a discussion of diversity-related issues in a context that was directly relevant to their chosen field of study. The topic of the WebQuest, “Medical Atrocities of the 20th Century,” required the students to consider the biomedical implications of prejudice in a variety of contexts and from different viewpoints. It called for students to examine documents, interview transcripts, and news articles relating to experiments conducted on poor African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama from 1932-1972 and Nazi concentration camp prisoners during World War II. Groups of students were charged with investigating different aspects of these events, including the social status and motivations of the experimenters and the subjects, the stated scientific justification for the experiments, and the modern system of medical ethics that developed in the aftermath of these historical events. This culminated in a class discussion to probe the circumstances that led to these tragic events. Within this context, the students also evaluated current medical ethical dilemmas such as the use of psychotropic drugs in children. The WebQuest format allowed them to explore primary sources available on the Internet and helped them to gain depth of understanding before engaging in group discussion.

WebQuests have been developed for a wide variety of topics and are freely available on the Web. Tools are available to help faculty create their own WebQuests or modify existing WebQuests to meet the needs of their students. In my UNIV 100 class, WebQuests have brought focus and structure to in-class discussions, elevated the level of discussion, and encouraged students to think critically about topics that have implications for their daily lives and their careers.

Medical Atrocities of the 20th Century WebQuest:
www.life.umd.edu/hhmi/univ/tuskegee_webquest.html

The WebQuest Page at San Diego State University:
http://webquest.sdsu.edu/webquest.html

Best WebQuests:
http://bestwebquests.com