Why Do Students Hate Lab?

Mariëlle Hoefnagels
University of Oklahoma
hoefnagels@ou.edu

Really. This is the single biggest challenge I face in my one-semester introductory biology course for nonmajors. The lab evaluations are consistently dismal, even though the overall course evaluations are very good.

What do students complain about? Ironically, the most common complaint is about something we can’t easily control: the 3-hour length of the lab. Students also believe that the teaching assistants drag everything out as long as possible so they have to stay the whole time. In other words, the lab activities bore the students to the point where many say they dread coming to the class.

And it’s not necessarily the activities. I try to avoid “cookbook” labs wherever possible, and I encourage my teaching assistants to establish a relaxed environment. I try to treat the lab as a low-pressure chance for students to learn how to design and evaluate experiments. Lab should be fun and educational, but many students think it is neither.

That’s bad.

To try to understand the problem, many semesters ago I started using weekly short post-lab evaluations that include a “Rate this lab on a scale of 1-10” question. As a result, I now know which labs students like and dislike. The perennial favorite is a “show-and-tell” lab in which speakers bring live scorpions, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals to the class. (I know it has nothing to do with experimental design, but it’s a memorable chance for students to see and touch unusual animals). The least popular labs usually either are microscope-based (e.g. plant-microbe interactions) or include tedious data collection activities (e.g. genetic drift).

I would love to improve this situation for my class. Also, I suspect others teaching introductory biology may share the same problem. Maybe we can use Labstracts to learn from each other. In that spirit, I would like to devote one or more future articles in Labstracts to (a) understanding whether this problem is widespread and (b) sharing ideas for improving labs. To make this work, I need your input. Please take a quick moment to email me at hoefnagels@ou.edu and answer as many of the following questions as you would like (or have time for):

• Do you share my problem with lab? That is, are students in general satisfied or dissatisfied with the lab experience in your course?
• If your students dislike lab, what measures (if any) have you tried to take to improve the situation? Do you think some degree of dissatisfaction is an unavoidable consequence of the very nature of lab?
• If your students like lab, what do you think accounts for that satisfaction?
• Which labs are your students’ favorites and least-favorites?
• What would you like to know about the experiences of your colleagues in ABLE?

Since ABLE is devoted to laboratory education, I hope that many of you will click the link to my email address and share your thoughts, no matter how brief. Labstracts is a forum for communication – so let’s share!