“That's Our Question!”: College Students' Epistemic Agency in Model‐Based Investigations

ABSTRACT Students should have opportunities to shape scientific knowledge building—both to make science more engaging and meaningful to them, and so they can learn to decide how and why to engage in scientific practices. Yet, it has been rare, even at the college level, for students to define and pursue their own scientific investigations. One challenge stems from a perceived trade‐off between allowing students to define their own paths of investigation and a desire for college students to engage with complex, disciplinarily meaningful ideas. In this paper, we address that tension by illustrating how students' epistemic agency emerged and led to meaningful scientific work. We describe the design of a 3‐week unit within a large‐enrollment introductory laboratory for college students that featured a system of interlocking models: a wet lab experimental model system and a computational model. We found that this design supported students in constructing and refining investigative aims that emerged from problems or contradictions they encountered at the intersection of the model systems. We also found that students were able to use each model system as an arena for making and enacting their own decisions about how to move their investigations forward. Ultimately, both identifying and shaping their own aims and making their own methodological choices contributed to students' sense of their scientific modeling work as meaningful.