CUR 2002 Workshop Report

Session II: Data Handling & Integrity: Teaching Students about Data Management and Record Keeping

Speaker: Julia Frugoli
Recorder: Julia Frugoli with assistance from Dale Kennedy (Albion College)
Number of attendees: 20

The session began with a general agreement on two statements: Making the jump from writing a lab report to keeping track of data on a day to day basis is a big leap for most students, and both giving academic credit for research and receiving funds for research makes data handling an ethical issue.

Dr. Frugoli discussed her universities undergraduate research course, and how she based her grading in this course on a "contract". The contract involves the number of hours per week in the lab and the research expectations, which are couched in terms of attempted techniques, appropriate controls, and troubleshooting, not results. Therefore the students are graded on learning how to do science, not on getting a certain result. Each individual must give a 10-20 minute presentation to the department and write a paper which is graded and placed in the department files.

She then used examples of students who had taken the course to show her own evolution of understanding as to how to convey to students the importance of record keeping and data management. The key seemed to be an understanding that the student's notebook was a resource for the next student, more than the understanding that it was a record (although by default it was also that).

Posing the question "Why do you keep a notebook?" to both students and faculty results in different answers. Faculty understand it as a record of research, no matter what the outcome (i.e., not just the "good" experiments), a way to avoid problems from selective memory, and a resource for others. Students however tended to see it as a basis for a grade, or a diary. Only when they saw it as a resource for others did they adjust their recording methods to produce useful notebooks.

Therefore, Dr, Frugoli adjusted her management of the students taking the undergraduate research course to actually discuss notebooks rather than assume the students will pick up notebook technique by osmosis.

Some of the things students need to be told about a notebook:
They should fill it out every time they do an experiment.
A well-kept notebook is an ethical responsibility they have to any agency that grants funds for their research.
In certain formats, a notebook is a record that can aid patent applications.
When things go really wrong (accusations of data falsification, for instance) the notebook is the record that will be turned to.

The workshop participants discussed notebook formats, from the spiral bound, double-signed notebooks of industry, to the loose-leaf notebooks students are more familiar with. Within loose-leaf notebooks we discussed organization by day (when the experiment was done) by category (with dividers for different projects) or by person (a possibility when multiple researchers work on the same problem sequentially-a common situation in undergraduate research). Ways to deal with computer data were discussed as well, and the most common seemed to be a folder on the lab computer for each student, with CD backups.

The group then worked through several case studies on data integrity from Robin Penslar's book "Research Ethics". These cases highlighted the conflict student see between being truthful and being right, with the second one often seen by students as more important.

The emphases participants took away from the workshop were to lead by example, and to emphasize the research process rather than the "right answer", both in undergraduate research and in laboratory courses.