Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
wanting to reproduce the work or understand it better. On either the informal
laboratory summary page or the primary laboratory notebook, students are
required to acknowledge and link to helpful resources they relied on to carry
out the work, such as other students, the laboratory manual, Wikipedia, and
so on, to helpful resources, either on a summary page or primary laboratory
notebook.
25.5.2.7 Instructor Feedback
When students have completed their labora-
tory summary, they “hand in” their work by sending the instructor an e-mail
with a link to the summary. The instructor puts comments, compliments, and
criticism “in the margins” of the work by directly editing the wiki. For the one
formal report, instructor feedback on the rough draft is extensive, attempting
to explicitly point out all defi ciencies that need to be worked on. Thus, almost
all of the student work and instructor feedback is publicly visible to the world,
with only the letter grade and perhaps other e-mail communication kept
private. As the semester progresses, the volume of instructor feedback dimin-
ishes greatly, and usually feedback for the fi nal informal summaries is not
given. The instructor's impression is that feedback earlier in the semester is
more valuable. Furthermore, student work seems to improve greatly after
feedback is given for the fi rst summary.
25.5.2.8 Formal Report
For one of the laboratories of their choosing, the
students are required to prepare a formal report in the style of a typical
peer-reviewed publication. A rough draft of this report is due in approxi-
mately week 12 of the 16-week semester. This report is “handed in” to the
instructor by e-mailing a link to the wiki page. All feedback by the instructor
is put in “the margins” as with the other feedback. This feedback tends to be
more extensive than with informal summaries [172]. A letter grade for the
rough draft is e-mailed to the students privately. This letter grade is typically
a D or C to indicate the amount of improvements needed, but students
receive full credit as long as they hand in the rough draft on time and with
suffi cient effort having been made. During the fi nal week of the semester,
the students work in the lab to repeat the experiment for which they're
writing their formal report. The goal is to implement some of their ideas for
improving their measurements after having thought deeply about the work
while writing the formal report. The fi nal draft of the formal report is due at
the end of the semester [180].
25.5.3
Outcomes (Anecdotal)
An effort has not been made to scientifi cally track the impact of ONS in this
laboratory course. In order to do so, measurable goals would need to be
defi ned and students would need to be tested before and after the course.
Instead, the instructor has so far relied on anecdotal observations. He has
observed many positives from the use of ONS. Students routinely read each
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