The data aggregation project: Free software that transforms the student laboratory experience

Abstract

THE DATA AGGREGATION PROJECT (DAP) allows an instructor to quickly create a set of simple Web interfaces that make it easy for students to enter and check data, along with a link for the data to be downloaded as a spreadsheet. This means that an instructor can easily challenge students with large sets of data, which provides several practical pedagogic benefits including increasing ability to observe phenomena with small effects, reducing effects of observational errors, and providing a rationale for using technology to perform data analysis. In the introductory biology course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a large lecture course with 30 laboratory sections, adoption of the DAP resulted in an increase in the number of data points students analyzed per semester from N=80 (estimated) to N=2237 (observed), an increase by a factor of almost 30.