Collaborative Research in Teaching: Collaboration between Laboratory Courses at Neighboring Institutions.

The concept of collaboration is central to many scientific endeavors. Here we present a model for collaborative research between laboratory courses in behavioral neuroscience at different institutions (or for that matter, multiple classrooms at a single institution). This course design engages undergraduate students in novel scientific research inside the classroom, and in discussion of that research between classrooms. In addition to exposing students to scientific collaboration, teaching these courses in tandem allows for the sharing of a number of resources while allowing collection of potentially publishable data and training students to conduct continuing independent research. For the 2003 and 2004 school years, we have run in collaboration the Laboratory in Brain and Behavior course at Colby College and the Laboratory in Behavioral Neuroscience: Learning and Memory course at Bowdoin College. The students enrolled in these courses have conducted primary, novel research projects designed by the instructors using animal subjects. Students learn experimental design, and surgery, behavioral testing, and histological techniques. Enrollments are limited in these courses, so having both groups of students perform the same protocols increases the number of subjects in these studies, and therefore, the statistical power of the experiment. The physical distance between the schools requires that technology be used to bring students in the two courses together. We have used threaded discussion groups accessible to students at both schools for everyday exchange of methodological information and have used videoconferencing for "lab meetings" addressing methodological issues and data analysis.

Laboratory courses are often a compromise between the ease of “canned” exercises and the resources and time it takes to introduce students to the excitement of a novel research project. Ideally, we would like all students to do real research, and to do it as early in their academic careers as possible. This is especially true for STEM students (National Research Council, 2003), and recent reports have emphasized the importance of close research collaboration with faculty to the success of underrepresented minority students (e.g., Gandara and Maxwell-Jolly, 1999). This approach may be more challenging, but it may also be a better way to meet many of the desired curriculum outcomes such as those laid out by Wiertelak (2003). These outcomes include 1) introducing students to experimental methodology, design, and data analysis, 2) advanced awareness of a particular field within neuroscience, 3) critical and independent thought, 4) effective communication skills, and not least, 5) ethics.

Clearly, involving students in real research takes a considerable amount of time and resources. One way to reduce the load is to share experimental design, preparation and data between multiple classrooms or institutions. Here we present a model laboratory experience within the collaboration of two behavioral neuroscience courses at different institutions. The Laboratory in Brain and Behavior course at Colby College (PS235) and the Laboratory in Behavioral Neuroscience: Learning and Memory course at Bowdoin College (Psyc276) are designed such that students participate in a real scientific experiment using rat subjects.

This model brings with it several advantages over individual laboratory courses. In our experience, we have been able to alternate summer piloting of the upcoming year’s project, we have been able to pool data sets to increase n’s above what either lab could generate alone (especially important when classes are small), and we have fostered ongoing scientific collaboration between students and faculty at the two institutions.

MODEL COURSES

In these courses, students work together to investigate the neural basis of declarative memory in rats. In past projects, students have tested hypotheses such as whether the hippocampus is critical for nonspatial memory (2003) or “what, where, when” episodic memory (2004). For fall 2006, we will be exploring spatial and nonspatial retrograde memory. As a part of the courses, students learn hypothesis testing, a circumscribed literature germane to the hypothesis, basic skills in stereotaxic surgery (electrolytic lesions of the fornix), behavioral testing, histology, data analysis, and finally the ability to parlay the literature and their own results into formal scientific communication of their findings (e.g., preparation of a journal article as if for publication; see example syllabi in the Appendices).

Laboratory courses at our institutions are relatively small; enrollments have varied between six and 20 students each. Bowdoin College has a shared laboratory instructor who aids the professor in the teaching of student-run procedures. At Colby, the professor is aided by a student teaching assistant.

Typically, we have made a decision about the research question before the classes begin for two reasons (see Preparation below). First, this allows us to pilot the experiment during the summer before the course starts, thus increasing the likelihood that the novel research project will work. In order to reduce resources and faculty time expended, this pilot work is done at only one institution. Second, determining the focus early allows us to choose a research question consistent with the research programs of the instructors. This is not essential, but has the benefit of supporting an ongoing research program. In other words, the integration of teaching with a successful research project helps faculty meet their own research expectations.

During the first several weeks of the courses (see sample syllabi in the Appendices), students are oriented to the theoretical background of the project and to the major procedures, and are divided into laboratory pairs. Critically, we also discuss the process by which we arrived at the hypothesis and design of the experiment. Because students will be expected to test their animals five days per week and to schedule outside procedures such as surgeries and perfusions with their partner, selection of an appropriate lab partner is essential. As we run the courses, and because we are training rats, students are expected to contribute significant outside of class time to the project. While this extra time could potentially be problematic, students are generally enthusiastic because the prospect of participating in a real research project outweighs the time commitment. In fact, we have had only a single student leave the course because of time conflicts and that person took the course the following year.

Once the students are divided into lab pairs, the pairs are randomly assigned two rats – one that will serve as a sham control, and one that will receive a surgical manipulation. Pairs select a daily testing time and major procedure times (e.g., surgery). Both students of each pair are required to attend every testing session and procedure. This requirement is intended to teach the students the importance of ethical, humane, consistent treatment of and respect for the animal subjects, as well as the commitment one makes to the experimental process.

The course meetings are divided into “labs” and “journal clubs.” Lab time is devoted to training the proper handling of animals, the techniques used in major procedures and behavioral testing, discussion of the ethics and regulations around the use of animals in research, and discrete procedures that can be completed within the allotted time (e.g., histological staining). During journal clubs, students are expected to discuss two or three primary research papers on topics germane to the study being conducted. There are three primary goals of the journal clubs. First, students are oriented to how to read and interpret primary research, and how to present scientific content to their peers. Second, students are given good and bad examples of science writing to help demonstrate appropriate style for scientific writing. And third, the material covered in the journal clubs will ultimately become a part of the literature review in their final project – writing a scientific journal article (we have found that the Journal of Neuroscience Brief Communication or Behavioral Neuroscience formats are ideal for teaching students the rules of publishing in the field; see http://www.jneurosci.org/misc/ifa_bc.shtml).

In addition to journal club and lab work, each class session begins with a lab meeting to discuss daily progress of the experiment. During these times, we discuss how to deal with behavioral problems (e.g., response biases) encountered during daily testing. Toward the end of the course, these discussions turn to analysis of data and the findings. Because the course meets infrequently relative to daily testing and because data will ultimately be pooled across classrooms, students are additionally asked to post comments, questions, and data to a Threaded Email Stream (see below). Special lab meetings are also scheduled at critical junctures to allow all of the students to interact (see Videoconferencing below).

This course design provides many benefits for both students and professors. The students learn the design and methods of a novel research study and experience the ups and downs of primary research. In addition, they experience the collaborative nature of research and learn the benefits and challenges of conducting research with others. They also learn to communicate their ideas and questions in forms appropriate to scientific inquiry.

The professors are allowed the opportunity to conduct novel, potentially publishable research in the context of teaching, allowing the overlap of pedagogy and research that is beneficial when there is an expectation of both good teaching and good research from faculty at their home institution. The collaboration we are advocating in this article 1) allows faculty to share some resources (e.g., piloting the experiment), 2) allows faculty to share the development of experimental design and research ideas, and 3) helps to improve the likelihood of publishable data by increasing the number of available subjects included in data analysis, thereby counteracting the variability that arises from multiple investigators/surgeons/histologists working on a single project. In other words, increasing sample size decreases the standard error of the sampling distribution of means, thereby increasing statistical power.

PREPARATION

Several steps are involved in the development of these courses. First, the professors meet to discuss possible projects. Each year of this arrangement the class experiment has been piloted at either Bowdoin (2003) or Colby (2004) in the summer prior to the semester that the courses occurred. Bowdoin will pilot the experiment in summer 2006. Also necessary is coordination of class schedules such that experimental procedures occur as close in time proximity as possible and that appropriate times can be arranged for videoconferencing (The schedules used in 2004 can be found in the sample syllabi in Appendices I and II). In addition, it is necessary to coordinate with the ITS/Media services departments to allow sufficient lead time to establish the email stream and to set up the videoconferencing equipment in each lab.

VIDEOCONFERENCING

In order to have the members of each class meet and discuss matters important to the course without requiring the students to travel, we take advantage of the mobile videoconferencing capabilities of both schools. Members of the ITS/Media Services departments are able to set up the mobile units in the teaching laboratories at each school. The videoconferencing connection is established through a standard TCP/IP network using network protocol H.323 language (this is a standard language for video transmission over the network). The hardware used to establish the videoconferencing link is two Model FX portable Polycom units (Polycom Inc., Pleasanton, CA; www.polycom.com), one unit located at each institution. A direct IP to IP connection between the Polycom units joins the participating institutions and visual and auditory information is displayed on a television by connecting the S Video output from the Polycom to a TV. For the first “lab meeting” we plan a general itinerary that involves introductions of faculty, instructors, teaching assistants, and students, discussion of the progress of each class, and the protocol for upcoming behavioral procedures. The format and set up are quite successful and allow the students to see and interact with those students that will be posting on the threaded discussion. The later videoconference is used for discussion of successes and failures in the methods and for data analysis. This time is also used to brainstorm changes to the protocol for future studies which are often conducted by independent study and honors students gathered from the courses.

THREADED EMAIL STREAM

For fall 2004, Nancy Grant and Adam Lord of the CIS department of Bowdoin College were charged with developing a platform by which students and faculty from both schools could read and contribute to a running discussion of course concepts and procedure. They integrated XMLBoard software licensed through the Free Software Foundation with the Psych276 course webpage to provide a multiforum message board. Posts were stored in XML format on the web server and rendered as HTML to users via a Perl module running an XML parser. More information about the software can be found at http://freshmeat.net/projects/xmlboard. The resulting page, named “Rat Recall Discussion,” is shown in Figure 1 at a mid-way point in the experiment. The posts for the entire Fall 2004 semester can be viewed at http://academic.bowdoin.edu/cgi-bin/xmlboard.cgi?board=PSYC%20276&action=index. Students from both institutions were required to post descriptions of each day’s behavioral run to the site so that others in the courses may track the progress of all animals in the study.

Figure 1

The Rat Recall Discussion board shown at a mid-way point through the Fall 2004 semester. Posts are descriptions of protocols and behavioral runs. Students are required to post results in real time (each day) and are asked to discuss problems and successes in the behavioral protocol.

CHALLENGES AND DIFFICULTIES

There are a number of challenges in coordinating this sort of collaboration. We have been lucky that the scheduling of our courses has allowed us to employ the videoconferencing without having to do so outside of class times. The course at Bowdoin was scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, while the course at Colby was taught on Tuesday afternoons.

In addition to the scheduling differences, there are credit/workload differences between the two courses. The Bowdoin course is a four credit hour course that involves both lecture and lab time. The Colby course is a one credit laboratory course. This generally means that the students in the Bowdoin course get more extensive background for the study and that it is supported closely by the material they are covering in the lecture portion of the course. In order to adjust for this discrepancy, we have focused primarily on the data and materials from the experiment in the discussions and have had the Bowdoin students explain some of the background information to the Colby students. Additionally, the overall academic schedules differ slightly between the two schools. Bowdoin begins before Colby and so usually has a head start on the experiment and their experience allows necessary modifications of the protocols before the Colby group begins.

There have also been several challenges associated with the course discussion board. Initially, because the discussion was set up at Bowdoin, Colby students needed special permissions to access the board. The first solution was to keep the stream open (not password protected). However, this opened the stream to spam entries. For the 2006 year, we will be developing a dedicated, password-protected website for the collaboration. This website will further allow the consolidation of resources. This secure website will house a) links to the threaded email stream, b) links to common resources for course materials (e.g., protocols), c) digital video of example procedures including surgery, behavioral testing, and histology demonstrations, and d) raw data (e.g., digitized video clips of all behavioral testing sessions so that students could score other students sessions to ensure that behavioral scoring is more uniform). For future years’ collaborations, this website will require only minor modification and updating.

OUTCOMES

We have found that the student response to the courses is extremely favorable. In particular, students are enthusiastic about the opportunity to participate in real research, and express a better understanding of the scientific process at the end of the course. These responses are reflected in several selected student comments below:

“This course was awesome! It was so great to do real science and perform actual brain surgery ourselves.”

“The class kind of took over my time, but in return, I learned so much.”

“It was awesome to be exposed to “real” science this semester. It taught me a lot about the pitfalls and problems associated with science, and gave me a long-lasting appreciation of the scientific process.”

“It was a great research and lab experience. We were involved in all aspects, including the process of improvising when things didn’t go according to plan.”

“I thought that this lab was by far one of the more valuable experiences I’ve had here at Colby. Very unique and hands-on.”

Perhaps the best indication of the success of this model is that invariably students enrolled in these courses have become invested in the projects, and two or three students (at each institution each semester) have continued working on the studies as independent or honors research projects. It is noteworthy that these independent research students have already been trained in the techniques they will need to complete the work on their project, reducing the time faculty spend training students. To this point, one project has ultimately resulted in a presentation at the Society for Neuroscience meeting (Herrick et al., 2004), and these data have recently been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Several other projects begun in the courses are continuing as ongoing honors and independent research projects.

Furthermore, while the collaboration has not cut the resources necessary to teach such courses in half, it has reduced the cost in materials and time for the two institutions and faculty. First of all, combining data between classes increases statistical power by increasing the number of subjects in the experiment. Pooling subjects also allows the courses to be taught even when enrollments are low. For example, enrollments have been as low as six students in an individual class. In this case, in order to test enough animals for a successful experiment, students would have to spend more time than is justified by the credit load of the courses. This would mean that faculty or laboratory instructors would need to pick up the extra work in order to get meaningful (potentially publishable) results.

Second, we have alternated the piloting of the experiments, so that only one faculty needs to dedicate substantial time to the experiment during the summer. In addition, the cost of pilot animals and supplies is halved for the two courses since only one pilot study is necessary. Third, designing a study that is novel, theoretically interesting, and amenable to the constraints of the classroom is both challenging and time-consuming. By collaborating on the project, the faculty are able to share ideas and planning for a single project. Finally, other resources can also be shared. For example, in 2006 we intend to invite several outside speakers to make research presentations germane to the experiment. Using our video-conferencing abilities, we will be able to share those speakers between institutions.

CONCLUSIONS

Here we have presented a model for the integration of teaching and research. We believe that introducing students to real research projects within the classroom 1) engages students more deeply in the projects and methodologies, 2) gives students a realistic view of the conduct of scientific enquiry, 3) trains students in techniques germane to the instructors’ research programs, and 4) potentially produces publishable data. Furthermore, we argue that collaboration can be a useful tool with which instructors can decrease the resources necessary to conduct a “real” study and also, through pooling data, can increase the likelihood of publishable results by increasing sample sizes. In addition, this model could be used to integrate multiple lab sections of a larger course at a single institution instead of labs at different institutions.

While the scope and animal model (rats) used in the model courses may not work for every institution, there are many other research questions that can be scaled to the capabilities of collaborating individuals or institutions. Thus, we believe that the model could be adapted to almost any institution and research program.

Week	Lab Period Activities	Experiment Activities
1	Orientation: Introductions, Expectations, Responsibility, Lab Partners	Experiment Overview IACUC protocol
2	Human and sheep brains, Journal Club
3	Surgery Demo	Meet your rats: Handling Techniques
4	VIDEOCONFERENCE	Surgery: Sign up for times
5	Behavior Demo	Recovery
6	FALL BREAK	Acclimation to maze, Transport, Handling, Food preference, Turn in lab notebooks
7	Journal Club, Discussion: Scientific Writing	Training
8	Journal Club, Progress Report	Training
9	Journal Club, Progress Report, Methods Draft Due	Training
10	Perfusion Demo	Training
11	Data Analysis, Introduction Draft Due	Perfusions: Sign up for times
12	Brain Slicing Demo	Slicing: Sign up for times
13	Staining Demo, Wrap-up, Questions on Papers	Staining
	Lab Notebooks Due, Final Paper Due, Keys Due

Week	Topic	Outside Class Time
1	Orientation: Expectations, Responsibilities, Introductions, Choosing your lab partner, Overview of experiment. Lab Demonstration: Perfusion
2	Lab: Surgical techniques. Lab partner choice/journal club topics due. Lab Demonstration: Lesion surgery
3	Lab: Meet your rats/handling techniques. Lecture: The catastrophe of memory. Multiple memory systems. (Lab: Library Orientation). Sign up for testing times	Surgery
4	Discussion: The ethics and responsibilities of animal research. Discussion: Experimental Design. Lecture: Anatomy of the rat olfactory memory system. Discussion: Scientific Reading and Writing. Lab: Behavioral Shaping Techniques	Surgery
5	Journal Club 1: Dissociations within the temporal lobe memory system. Guest Lecture: Diane Lee, CSU Long Beach	Recovery
6	Journal Club 2: The role of the hippocampus in space; VIDEOCONFERENCE. Journal Club 3: The role of the hippocampus in episodic memory Lab: Behavioral Testing Techniques	Shaping
7	Fall Break. Journal Club 4: The role of the cortex in memory.	Shaping
8	Journal Club 5: Fornix vs. Hippocampal lesions. Lab: Writing Introduction and methods. Take-Home Exam distributed	Training
9	No Class – SfN Meeting. Memento. Take-Home Exam due at beginning of class	Training
10	Journal Club 6: Declarative vs. Nondeclarative memory – dissociations I. Journal Club 7: Declarative vs. Nondeclarative memory – dissoc. II. Methods section draft due	Training
11	Journal Club 8: Declarative vs. Nondeclarative memory – neuropsych. Lab: Another look at the Intro, Writing Results and Abstract. Discussion: behavioral results. Sign-ups due for perfusion and histology	Training
12	Lab: Histological Techniques and Perfusions. Guest Lecture: Howard Eichenbaum, Boston University. Intro draft due	Perfusion/Slicing
13	Discussion: Interpreting and presenting behavioral results. Thanksgiving Break	Perfusion/Slicing
14	Lab: Writing a conclusion. Lab: Staining. Lab: Interpreting what you see under the ‘scope	Slicing & Staining
15	Lab: Analysis of brains. Abstract draft due. Discussion: Final Presentation and discussion of results	Histological Analysis
	Final day to submit paper