Rachel Horak facilitated the JMBE Live! session on “Training for Responsible and Ethical Management of Lab Notebooks in CUREs.” Presented on October 28, 2022, Caitlin Light and Sonia Hills at Binghamton University. Sonia Hills was an undergraduate. Binghamtopn University’s First-year Research Immersion Program is a University-wide STEM program enrolling 300 first-year students. The three semester CURE sequence includes a research methods semester. The second semester is the lab experience before the third semester research experience. This study focused on the second semester. Responsible and Ethical Conduct of Research (RECR) in CUREs was a focus of Light’s ENCOUR fellowship (the year before I did it!). ENCOUR was an NSF RCN-UBE: Ethics Network for Course-based Undergraduate Research (ENCOUR). Light developed an RECR resource for use in CUREs, field tested it, and worked on this study. Light wanted to emphasize the importance of maintaining a lab notebook. Light asked the attendees: “Take a moment to reflect, how did you learn to maintain a proper research notebook?” Horak shared several responses: people learned from courses, graduate students, undergraduate research, first research job after graduation… Light noted that many “learned on the job” and had “a ha!” moments years later. Light created the Previous Student Lab Notebook Activity (PSNA). Four learning outcomes were created including predicting what would happen with different lab notebooks. For the PSNA activity, a pre-survey was shared. The rubric they created is part of the publication. The rubric has three quality categories and was focused on three levels: another researcher can use your lab notebook to … unusable. Light and Hills created a lab notebook entry that was intentionally missing key elements. Students were then asked to repeat an experiment based on this fragmented lab notebook centered around bacterial growth curves. Students were asked to follow this entry to reproduce the experiment in lab. Light noted that there is an implementation guide as part of the publication. Students were polled post-lecture/activity. ENCOUR helped with assessment. Light shared a graph with sections of a lab notebook and scores (0-3). Students and instructors rated the lab notebook sections. There was a significant difference pre/post and compared to the instructors scores for several key components. Students submitted fourteen different lab entries, and Light saw a steady increase in scores. The post-survey included several questions about lab notebooks and ethics. There were two case studies in the survey. Interestingly, there were shifts in responses pre/post. Students reported in 12 out of the 30 essays lab notebooks and data management! Light concluded that the PSNA and iterative practice and feedback on lab notebooks may contribute to improved lab notebook abilities. During the question and answer session, the presenters discussed data management practices beyond lab notebooks. In the second semester of the three-semester CURE sequence, students work in pairs on lab notebooks. During the third semester, lab notebooks are used by groups of five members. Electronic lab notebooks were used, leveraging Microsoft OneNote. Light also spoke about switching roles and future studies.
