The largest attempt to integrate a hands-on laboratory experience into an undergraduate curriculum has shown that it produces gains in both student grades and retention, an analysis at 20 participating universities has found.
The study, published on Tuesday in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, found that the percentage of first-year science undergraduates who continued to a second year increased from 82 percent to 93 percent when they took part in the lab program.
Participation in the program, known as Sea-Phages, also was associated with a “substantial” improvement in grades, according to the study’s authors, led by Graham F. Hatfull, a professor of biotechnology at the University of Pittsburgh.
The lab program was begun in 2008 and has now reached 4,800 students at more than 73 institutions, according to its sponsor, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a leading private financer of biological and medical research.
The approach “clearly has the potential to be truly transformative for science education,” Mr. Hatfull said.
The Sea-Phages curriculum emphasizes research methods and approaches, not deep scientific content. A key strategy behind the program is the study of DNA in bacteriophages, a relatively common and diverse group of viruses that replicate inside bacteria. Samples can be obtained from local soils.
Because the equipment needed to identify, extract, and purify the DNA is expensive, however, the costs of such a lab experience is “probably somewhat greater than what a typical intro lab course costs the institution,” said David J. Asai, director of the undergraduate-science-education program at the Hughes institute.
Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel laureate in physics who has made a second career of promoting improvements in undergraduate science education, said the study’s results, while needing further confirmation, appear impressive.
“Lab courses of all types are quite expensive, but educational results of instructional labs are generally quite poor,” said Mr. Wieman, now a professor of physics and of education at Stanford University. “So if you can provide these kinds of more authentic experiences at anything close to the same cost as a typical lab, the benefit to cost is much higher.”
