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Online Biology Pre-Labs
5/30/2003
"Student reads lab manual prior to class. Unusual move stuns professor, classmates."
This simulated newspaper headline, greeting students on the Biology Concepts Laboratory course Web site at Western Kentucky University, points out a common dilemma in college science laboratory courses. Too often students arrive at the laboratory totally unprepared.
It is no secret that many freshmen arrive at universities with less than ideal study habits. These same students are frequently surprised at the amount of homework and pre-class preparation required for College classes, especially in comparison with their previous experience.
The special challenge of teaching science laboratories is to ensure that students prepare in advance, so that they can explore the concepts rather than struggle with the details of the protocol. Many introductory science lab exercises have a cookbook format. D'es this sound familiar? Put 5 ml from tube A into tube B, record the color change … This, and the less-than-exciting prose of most science lab manuals make science lab classes ideal targets for procrastination and neglect by students. To a veteran instructor, the students who have not read the lab manual prior to class are obvious, for their attention is on the measurements, mechanics, and manipulations of the experiment, their focus on the "change in color" and where to record the data. They may completely overlook the biological or chemical principles they are meant to investigate.
The Digital Science Prelab
You could surmise that this is why the "Prelab" was created. The concept
of Prelab exercises is an old one. Many, if not most, introductory college chemistry
laboratory courses require handwritten (or more recently, download and complete)
outlines of lab procedures or flowcharts that often include sample calculations
as a Prelab. The intent is simple: to ensure the student has read the material
prior to attending lab and can successfully complete the experiments or exercises.
Several colleges and universities have taken the next steps in education tools for science laboratory classes. Digital Laboratory Manuals, digital videos of laboratory techniques, and interactive Prelabs are not uncommon. The intent of most of these projects is to supplement—not replace—the traditional lab exercises and to prepare the students for the lab exercises using simulations, animations, images, and videos.
The Biology Concepts Laboratory Prelabs at Western Kentucky University are a series of interactive online lab exercises and simulations that are designed to address the preparation problem in an interactive way. The project’s goals were to improve the students' experiences in the laboratory, familiarize them with the equipment and data analysis involved in the experiments, and thus allow them to focus on the biological principles underlying the experiments rather than on the manipulations.
In this project, all units either have multimedia simulations of activities performed in the exercises, or tutorials and quizzes that are submitted and graded prior to coming to lab each week. The Prelab exercises make extensive use of graphics, Flash animations, and Interaction through Active Server Pages. The result provides students with a virtual version of the laboratory experience as preparation and enhancement of the real lab exercises. The students must still come to the lab, hear an introduction, and perform the experiments.
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