'Research is messy. … Trying to protect students from that reality does them a disservice.' This week's ScienceWorkingLife:
With class about to start, I print 14 Western blot images for my students to discuss. The 3-hour lab is supposed to be the culmination of a weekslong research project in my undergraduate biology course, the day my students determine whether their experimental results support their carefully crafted hypotheses. But the images are all the same—and all full of nothing but background bands. My students are about to have a hard lesson in scientific failure and how to be resilient in the face of it.
I decided to develop a new course that would give our students experience performing real experiments, ones that had the potential to fail. Using my own research interests as a framework, I gave the students a collection of papers to read. During group brainstorming sessions, they identified new questions that arose from what had already been done and collectively came up with their own hypotheses.
After a solid hour of struggle and some leading questions on my part, one student finally spoke up. “It doesn’t make sense. The bands look the same size, but the proteins should be different sizes.” Hallelujah! A student had stepped back from seeing what they expected to see and described what the data actually showed. Their breakthrough helped their classmates start to look at the results with more objective eyes.
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