Are Lab Courses Worth the Investment: Factors that Affect Student Success in a Biochemistry Lab Course

Abstract

There are increasing challenges in maintaining and improving student outcomes in lab courses for a variety of reasons, including the relatively limited time students spend on experimental tasks, to the low credit hour to contact hour ratio. The push to increase enrollment and class sizes means that it is harder for academic programs to prioritize creation of resource‐demanding lab courses. That effective labs must operate in small sections with significant instructor interaction means that there is a disproportionate investment required by faculty, when compared with lecture‐based courses. Course‐based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are effective, but may not be suited to service lab courses, or large enrollment lab courses. This study aims to identify factors that directly affect student engagement and success in a service (non‐majors) lab course, which will contribute towards best practices in lab course development and implementation.Factors investigated in this study were overall course structure, lecture material delivery, lab assignments, general assessment strategies, remediation, and faculty presence during the lab session. The biggest single factor affecting student engagement and learning outcomes was faculty presence in the lab class. When the lab sections were run by TAs without faculty present, the students were more 53% more likely to have negative comments about the course, and did not perform as well (a decrease of almost 10% on final exam scores, and the D, F rate increased from 5.4% to 12.1%). Other significant gains seen in student engagement and learning appear to be as a result of interventions in overall course structure and customized remediation opportunities for students. Assessment in practical skills significantly improved outcomes, without necessarily improving engagement. “Flipping” the lecture delivery from in‐class to online, did not have any impact on engagement or outcomes overall, however there was a significant correlation between when and how long students watched online lecture material, and subsequent exam scores. Interestingly, changing the lab assignments from full lab reports to shorter, more focused assignments, did not impact outcomes, but did appear to increase student engagement.It is hoped that these results will help validate the impact of undergraduate lab courses, and justify the commitment of resources. Structuring lab courses effectively and efficiently, and assessing lab learning in a way that ensures students receive high quality instruction and feedback, and are achieving the desired outcomes, will mean that the benefits of these courses justify the costs by both faculty and students.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.