Online labs: An opportunity to enhance quantitative skills in undergraduates

Video Presentation

Authors:

• Jose M. Guzman, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, UW Seattle
• Erica Escajeda, Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, UW Seattle
• Katie McElroy, Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, UW Seattle
• Lindsay Alma, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, UW Seattle

Abstract:

Topic: Laboratory Design

Context: Marine Biology-250 is a lecture-laboratory course that meets critical curricular needs for the Marine Biology, Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and Oceanography majors, and every year introduces 200 first-year college and transfer students to the field of marine sciences during their first quarter at University of Washington. Traditionally, incoming students show a wide range in data analysis and visualization skills, and this variability manifests itself in their ability to perform in laboratory exercises with a quantitative component.

Scholarly basis: Our hypothesis is that applying principles of the flipped and scaffolding instruction teaching models will provide an opportunity for undergraduates to master quantitative skills. First, during the first two weeks of the course, students explored a series of course-specific, asynchronous tutorials on Excel which included basic and advanced quantitative skills required in subsequent laboratory exercises. Second, during successive lab sessions, students addressed increasingly more complex quantitative analyses (e.g., cleaning up and organizing data, deciding what test to run, etc.) always using as a framework the specific topic of the lab sessions. At the end of the quarter, we compared the complexity of the quantitative skills required in laboratory exercises with previous years, and surveyed students about their confidence in analytical skills.

Results: Students used more complex data analysis skills than in previous years (e.g., t-test, one- and two-way ANOVA). Students agreed or strongly agreed that they felt more comfortable using excel (90%), they felt more confident doing data analysis (83%), and they felt more confident creating graphs (87%) than at the beginning of the quarter.

Application: A self-paced, course-specific module on data analysis followed by scaffolded exercises in subsequent laboratory sessions is an efficient strategy in enhancing data analysis skills and confidence in undergraduate students participating in courses with a strong quantitative component.

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