Spring 1997

Formulae for Effective Lab Courses
Jennifer A. Secki, TRC Graduate Student Consultant and Department of Biology

Have you ever wondered what constitutes a good lab course? Could your lab course be described as effective? Would students find your lab course stimulating and enjoyable? What motivates students to come prepared for lab? What do students find most frustrating in lab courses? We asked an undergraduate student panel of science majors these and other questions to get the scoop on what they feel defines the most effective lab courses.

In general, good lectures and organization are essential for an effective lab. Additionally, students appreciate instructors and teaching assistants who are open to questions, approachable, accessible (particularly by e-mail), and "willing to go the extra mile". Students tend to be motivated by the amount of time and energy obviously invested by the instructor/teaching assistant and often want to avoid disappointing such a teacher. If the teacher is clearly disinterested, so are the students. The threat of pre-lab quizzes is usually not an effective way to get students to come prepared for lab. If a student is having a busy week or hasn't otherwise left time to prepare for lab, he/she is likely just to gamble that there will not be a quiz that week. Our panelists agreed that written assignments due at the beginning of lab (i.e. pre-lab "write-ups") usually force students to be prepared. Quizzes, on the other hand, are best reserved until after lab to let students know what they've learned and what they still have to learn. One caveat regarding pre-lab written assignments: if pre-lab "write-ups" and lab reports are due on the same day, students are likely to be less thorough on the pre-lab assignment.

Lab manuals that are outdated or "fill-in-the-blank" do not help students prepare or perform well. Students prefer handouts if current lab manuals are not available. Current materials also let the students know that the teacher has recently thought about the topic at hand. An effective lab manual clearly outlines the process and lists the steps of the exercise. Details regarding each of the steps should be contained separately in text.

Instructors considering new and innovative lab exercises will be happy to know that students tend to judge the success of a lab exercise based on what they learned, not on the results they obtained. They appreciate gaining "hands-on" experience and learning a process. Our panelists agreed that when their success was based solely on yield (i.e. grams of substance X obtained) or output, the exercise was less productive for learning. Instead, students feel that part of the learning process is also understanding why certain results might not be obtained. In a similar vein, our panelists suggested that upper-level labs should be discovery-based instead of "cookbook" style, to give students more applicable experience.

Students reported two primary frustrations during the execution of a lab exercise. The panelists commonly experienced situations where there was a lack of equipment or too many students in a section given the available equipment. Second, they feel that working in large lab groups is a hindrance to learning. Students prefer to work in pairs.

In many lab courses, grades are based largely on post-lab reports. However, our panelists reported that in most of their lab courses, they were not formally taught how to write a lab report nor were the teacher's expectations made explicit. Most learned by trial and error what was expected. In addition to the obvious remedies for these problems, our panelists suggested that the grade for the first lab report of a course should not be averaged into the final grade, but, rather, should be used to show the student where he/she needs to make improvements.

Students are concerned about variation in grading across multiple sections of the same lab course. Many students believe that the difficulty of quizzes varies from section to section, that the stringency of grading quizzes and lab reports also varies widely, and that each teaching assistant has his/her own curve with some T.A.s curving grades more than others. Our panelists made a number of suggestions with regard to these issues. First, a team of two or three T.A.s might be responsible for writing and grading the quizzes for all the students in the course for a particular week. Second, T.A. training for the course might include a workshop on grading students.

Our panelists noted that it would help students if the materials from the lab and lecture course coincided. If this is not possible, however, they feel the lab T.A. should have a syllabus of the lecture course and be attuned to when certain topics are covered in the lecture course. Most feel that it is not necessary for the T.A. to attend the lectures, though it would promote a common language between the instructor and the T.A.s.

In short, our panelists said they have experienced both good and bad lab courses during their tenures at the University. In their favorite courses, they learned a great deal and had fun while doing it! The most effective courses embodied many of the characteristics discussed here. Was your course one of their favorites?