Justin DiAngelo from Penn State Berks, Amy Hark from Muhlenberg College, Anne Rosenwald from Georgetown University, and Matt Wawersik from William & Mary presented at JMBE Live over a year ago. I finally had a chance to watch this recording. They are all authors on the “Facilitating Growth through Frustration: Using genomics Research in a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience” JMBE article. The session was entitled “Using Genomics Research in a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience.” They all spoke about getting started in education research and genomics. DiAngelo provided background on the GEP and the Formative Frustration article. The overall hypothesis was the idea of frustration aiding in student learning in a CURE setting because… annotation is difficult and can be frustrating. After GEP meetings and anecdotal evidence, they wanted to gather more evidence. Hark explained how they developed a “faculty formative failure survey.” They learned from instructors what obstacles they had to overcome and how students worked through them. The survey indicated that the challenges and setbacks seemed to increase collaboration. Sample data from the manuscript shared how instructors noticed how students overcame challenges. Rosenwald spoke about the student feedback and noted that “many responses mention both frustration and success.” Over two years of data collection, they obtained 647 comments in response to a prompt and analyzed by NVivo “for emergent themes and for keywords associated with frustration and success.” They began with “auto” coding and then refined the themes based on the context. Rosenwald noted that about 20% of the 647 comments mentioned frustration despite not asking about frustration. Yet, 56% of comments mentioning frustration mentioned successes! Wawersik explained their methods for student focus group comment analyses. Seven groups of six to eight students participated in discussions led by independent facilitators. The topics discussed were the impact of GEP course on their understanding science, career trajectory… Student focus group analysis with NVivo indicated high number of references to learning gains as well as “obstacles/frustrations.” Manual analysis uncovered that 72% of comments referencing struggle also referenced learning successes. The team concluded that evidence from faculty and student comments showed that “allowing students to struggle enables successes including: enhanced knowledge of topic, better understanding of the research process, questioning assumptions.” The team concluded that the learning environment, learning objective, formative strategy, and community are important to have the appropriate level of challenge. Rosenwald noted that people have used GEP resources from thegep.org for independent research with students and in numerous different contexts. One question was about what happens to students in the course who don’t “succeed,” and the research team mentioned that there is some literature on this topic and that participants have other goals such as group work in addition to annotation. I was impressed by how much data they coded and evaluated. The presenters also spoke about the years of assessment of the GEP how evidence thus far supports that the course affects student groups equally. Hark emphasized that the supportive learning environment is critical as being aware of when frustration isn’t positive is important. One audience member asked about using the GEP resources for a cell biology course, and the presenters mentioned that the focus on signaling pathways is a theme of the experience. For example, in one variation students isolated RNA and did qPCR to experimentally connect their bioinformatics models. Also, speakers talked about encouraging students to ask about and design future experiments. Connections to local and regional interests as well as opportunities for micro publications with student authors were discussed. I don’t know much about the GEP aside from what Marisol has shared. This session helped me realize how Rosenwald and others are connecting GEP, GEA, and NIBLSE!
