SKILL BUILDING ACTIVITIES

Some of the skills that students need :

• experimental design
• laboratory techniques
• critical/analytical reading
• analyzing and interpreting data
• collaborative group work
• oral and written expression

• Give students repeated opportunities to design their own experiments.
• Start with more limited frameworks and move to more open-ended activities.  For example, I require my beginning students (working in small groups) to compare the electrical activity of the same muscle under two different conditions, repeating each measure at least ten times.  The students choose what muscle they want to test and what the conditions are.  I teach them statistical tests to use in drawing the comparisons.
• Reading primary articles gives students ideas about how experiments can be designed.
• Students can write research proposals.
• Brainstorming sessions with the whole class can get ideas flowing; brainstorm ideas for new experiments or ways to test a given idea.

• Teach techniques explicitly just before students need to use them.
• Have students do successively more complex experiments
• Read primary literature for technical background.
• Require a draft Methods section to check for understanding
• Employ peer teaching through small-group work.

• It's important to supply plenty of time and structural support for reading the first primary article they encounter.  Encourage questions.
• Structure small-group work--for example, having small groups explain different figures or tables to the whole class.
• Have students write summaries of articles and also of previous student papers.
• Peer-editing helps students to improve their skills at summarizing and understanding articles.

• The whole class can be given a "rich data set" relevant to the topic and assigned in small groups to interpret and make sense of it.  This is an excellent exercise early in the semester for learning software skills.  The data set should contain enough variables and cases so that it more than fills the screen of a spreadsheet, and there should be various possibilities for interpretation.  For example, Bill Becker at Portland State University uses a set of weather data from different stations around Portland (with average and peak wind velocity, temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, etc. etc.) for each 10 minutes for a whole 24-hour period.  Students have to try to figure out what the day was actually like and make "knowledge claims" about what happened on that day.
• Use  "framework" experiments to give students a strong grasp of one experimental design and associated statistical or graphical analysis.
• Introduce students to a statistical software package such as Excel or Statistica.
• Use the reading of primary literature to show how data are analyzed and presented.

• Assign students to groups heterogeneously, at least part of the time.
• Use classroom time, as well as lab time, for small-group work. Small groups can present articles, teach techniques to one another, present different sides of a debate.
• Have students peer-edit one another's work.
• Ask them to reflect on what makes groups work well and ask them to evaluate their peers

• Students need time to learn to "speak the language" of research; they learn this well in small groups, especially when small groups are accountable to the whole class through oral reports.
• Require small-group reports on primary articles.
• Small groups should progress reports and oral reports on their research.  Classmates can rate and give feedback on reports.
• Poster sessions can be very effective.
• Peer-editing helps students learn to express themselves.