Modelling Record Keeping in an Undergraduate Physiology and Pharmacology Lab

Abstract

We have observed that our students struggle to maintain proper laboratory records in our department's undergraduate thesis program. This skill is essential to attain as we prepare students for graduate work and professional programs. Therefore, when we designed a new combined Physiology and Pharmacology undergraduate lab this year, we incorporated record keeping as a component of the course evaluation. In our course design, we gamified a record keeping task to engage students in our first week of lab. We varied how we modelled our instructions prior to the game by implementing an analogy in one of our two lab sections. Although the use of analogy is a common practice in teaching, few studies have assessed the effectiveness of this type of instruction on skill acquisition and long‐term retention. We hypothesized that students exposed to the analogy would perform better on record keeping activities. Each of our two lab sections were given an interactive lecture using the same resources highlighting common errors made in lab records. One lab section was taught using the analogy of following a baking recipe during a live “cooking” show we performed, where they identified omissions of records or excessive details. The other section identified the same error types using examples of standard lab techniques. Directly following instruction, half of each section (group A) for both the analogy and standard instruction was tasked to complete a GPS‐enabled scavenger hunt using an app on their cellular phones. This scavenger hunt had four stations set up in different locations on campus where students completed basic lab skills such as pipetting, weighing, and labelling tubes. Group A students were instructed to maintain a record of their activity throughout the exercise based on the lecture just provided. Upon completion, these records were passed to the remaining students (group B) who were asked to follow them to replicate the exercise without the use of the GPS instructions, if possible. Upon completion of the game, group B students rated the effectiveness of the lab records provided by group A on a five point Likert scale for each station. Subsequently, instructors evaluated record accuracy. Using an unpaired t‐test, we found no significant differences in student perception of the effectiveness of written records between the baking analogy and standard instruction groups (p> 0.25). There was also no significant difference in the accuracy of the records between either lab section. However, we may observe long‐term differences in students' ability to maintain records once these are analyzed at the end of the academic year. Our current data are consistent with a study by Podolefsky & Finkelstein (2006) who showed no significant differences on a post‐test question after using an analogy to teach electromagnetic waves in a large undergraduate physics class. Some studies suggest that students may fail to understand a concept due to the inability to see the limitations of the analogy. Our students may have had difficulties transferring the analogy to the record keeping concept being taught. Alternatively, the exposure to a single analogy may not be robust enough to be effective in immediate skill acquisition.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.