Teaching data management and literacy to support course‐embedded research projects

Abstract

Course-based undergraduate research experiences are an excellent approach to involve a large team of students in scientific study. These CUREs can generate lots of data that may be useful to the scholarship of the instructor and others. While the focus of many CUREs is on developing the scientific skills of students, embedding professional skills in these frameworks can enhance the quality and applicability of this training to a wider range of future careers. Data are ubiquitous in all careers and being able to make data accessible to others is an important professional skill. We saw with the novel coronavirus pandemic publicly accessible sequences and structures aided in the development of vaccines and potential therapeutics. Thus teaching students how to manage their data properly may help the progress of the field and aid the students in their future careers. I have developed an activity to inform students on data management practices and have them apply their lessons to a mock data set. In this activity, students take a poorly organized and formatted data set which students organize, reformat, then write a README file to describe the organization and contents of the data set to others. Students perform this activity on the Open Science Framework and have to physically organize the data as well as open the files to reformat and clean the data. Afterward, students reflect on the experience and how they may change their management of data. Later projects in the course include proper management of data as part of the assessment to encourage good practice and provide opportunities for the instructor to give feedback to the students. From this activity, students learn and demonstrate the practices of data management to enhance their course-embedded work and hopefully their professional careers.