• Week 1 - Exploring a Scientific Paper - This lab provides students with further practice reading and interpreting scientific literature.  The lab allows students to choose from a variety of articles that relate to prior lab explorations thereby allowing students to work on topics that are most interesting to them.  It also uses established collaborative learning practices which encourage students to come prepared to lab and to collaboratively develop more sophisticated understandings of their article, and to use the article as a basis for informing a question/hypothesis for their independent project. 
• Week 2 - Proposal Development & Peer Review - In this lab teams develop a formal proposal for the project; give detailed methods, and the proposed analysis.  Proposals are then peer-reviewed by another lab team and evaluated the instructor.  Feedback from the instructor and from the peer evaluation will be used to modify their proposal prior to conducting their investigation in subsequent weeks.
• Weeks 3-4 – Proposal Revisions & Experimentation
• Week 5 – Data Analysis and Poster Preparation
• Week 6 – Poster Symposium and submission of draft extended abstracts.   Students can modify their abstracts based on feedback they receive during the poster symposium.

• use the primary literature to inform/formulate a biological question emerging from a prior lab exploration.
• analyze a scientific paper, to find the hypothesis statement, main results, and conclusions; evaluate the methods and conclusions of the paper.
• formulate a biologically-based question.
• develop a properly formatted conceptually (using concepts explored in introductory biology) justified experimental hypothesis and prediction.
• develop an experiment which
• properly assigns a dependent and independent variables
• has proper control groups (negative & positive where appropriate) and controls variables across treatments and trials.
• properly controls for selection bias in assigning subjects to treatments.
• provide a detailed and conceptually accurate explanation of the conceptual relations between the biological processes and a quantitative measures of that process used in their experiment.
• record, organize, sort and graph data in a MS Excel spreadsheet
• choose the appropriate graph to summarize data where the dependent and independent variables are both continuous measurement variables.
• choose the appropriate type of inferential statistical analysis to perform on data from an experiment of their own design.
• generate and Interpret other relevant descriptive statistics: r2, slope of a best fit linear equation, measures of variation (standard deviation or error).
• use appropriate inferential statistical tests (SLR, t-test, Chi-square) performed in MS Excel (or StatPlus for Mac) to analyze data.
• draw conclusions from their data analysis using biological concepts explored in an introductory biology course and/or primary literature research.
• communicate experimental research findings in both written (team scientific poster & individual extended abstract) and oral (poster symposium defense) formats.
• provide thoughtful and accurate evaluation of the merits of research proposals and articles developed by other teams in the class.

The focus of this multi-week investigation is to build on students understanding of how science is done by having them experience the entire process of science from (hypothesis formation, aspects of experimental design and predictions) up to the students. Asking good (biologically relevant) questions, formulating informed hypotheses and experimental predicitions, and devising effective procedures are among the most creative and also challenging aspects of science.  Allowing students to have an authentic science experience, early in their academic career, can help students begin to decide whether or not basic or applied scientific research is of interest to them professionally.  In fact, even for those who will not become practicing scientists, the problem-solving nature of science and the intellectual skills employed are easily transferable to other fields/disciplines.  Students require practice employing these important intellectual skills and they require constant feedback on their progress.  This independent project lab experience utilizes a peer-review process to do this.  The process purposefully mimics how the professional scientific community scrutinizes the ideas/work of their peers and is intended to help students understand how the scientific community validates knowledge as accurate or judges the likelihood of success, merit, and importance of proposed research ideas.   This project has found that students are more likely to use scientific knowledge to inform their decisions about science-related issues when they also understand the limitations of this knowledge and the lengths to which the community of professional scientists have gone to establish its accuracy. 

• An instructor guide which provide lab instructors with lab preparation instructions, guidance to provide students in developing their proposals, learning theory and pedagogical suggestions, and peer evaluation & grading rubrics.

• Vernier data loggers and sensors (pressure, EKG, blood pressure, temperature)
• Student team computers with MS Excel