A Novel Approach to Teaching a General Education Course on Astrobiology

It is often a challenge to arouse much interest, motivation, and engagement in physical science courses among non-STEM majors. We attempt to address this difficulty and at the same time strive to achieve high levels of student learning by choosing a novel as the main text of the course. We created a context-rich course on astrobiology—the science of life in the universe—that uses Carl Sagan's Contact as the main text. We were able to teach the entire subject matter of a conventional course without omitting any topic. A typical class session included discussion of the science content of one chapter of Contact after students are assigned to read it and answer questions before the lecture. We assessed our approach with pretests and posttests that measure students’ knowledge of the key content areas, as well as students’ perceptions. We then calculate the students’ normalized gains, the effect size, and perform hypothesis testing. Our results show that this approach can result in substantial learning gains for students and at the same time improve students’ self-assessment and perceptions of science while not compromising the absolute learning gains.