One of the best parts of my job is teaching. I particularly enjoy teaching Herpetology, which I have taught Herpetology at three different institutions- I taught Herpetology at Georgia Southern when I was a faculty at that institution, and I currently teach Herpetology at both Florida International University and at the University of Virginia’s Mountain Lake Biological Station. I have made herpetology particularly meaningful for both myself and the students by incorporating ana authentic class research project into the courses both at MLBS and FIU, which nowadays is called “course-based undergraduate research experience”.
Of course, most laboratory classes in biology involve research, but most research in these laboratories has a predetermined outcome (at least if the lab goes well!), and involves following a pretty strict protocol. I have taught those type of laboratories and classes, and I think they are the right choice for the priorities in certain course. However, when I speak of integrating “authentic” research into courses, that is not what I am describing. Nor am I thinking of small-scale individual or small-group projects that are unlikely to be able to satisfactorily answer any scientific question. Rather, I mean “authentic” research in that we do not know the answer to the research question, we design the study and experiments together as a class, and we aim for enough replication to end up with a publishable chunk of research, with all of the students coauthors on and contributors to the resulting manuscript.
What are the benefits of incorporating authentic research into your classes? Well, for the instructor, this can help generate data for research productivity (not a factor at an R1, but could be important for positions where the teaching load is substantial) and make instruction more immediate, concrete, and compelling. But generally, incorporating research in this way is a lot more work for the instructor, and the real benefit is to the students. Students that participate in these sorts of classes get improved learning outcomes, realistic research experience, and may even get to be a coauthor on a scientific publication. We know that research experiences can improve social understanding of science, increase representation of under-represented groups, and help students get into graduate school (either in biology or medical school or similar). However, most students attend public institutions and will not be able to work in a laboratory. Course based research expands access to research in a way that I find satisfying, although it by no means solves the access issue.
I have been integrating authentic research into Field Herpetology classes at Mountain Lake Biological Station since I first taught the class in 2016, and in my Herpetology class at FIU since 2021. So what I will be describing is what works for me. However, I do think that what will work can vary a lot across types of institutions and courses (i.e., I have only integrated research into an upper-level organismal course with limited enrollment). Also, I think my approach works because I like writing papers a lot, and rarely is anyone else interested in being the first author. This is not a humble-brag- just because I like it does not mean I am good at it, and I like writing any sort of paper, regardless of impact. In fact, I regularly procrastinate by writing a modest paper when I should be working on grant proposals or more difficult, higher impact papers. Some scientists are more motivated by other aspects of the research process but don’t love writing, and if you are that sort of scientist, it is unlikely that you will motivate yourself to write up a class project for publication. Regardless, I am just trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive, when I discuss how these courses work for me.
The first place where I tried to integrate authentic research into a course was my Field Herpetology class at Mountain Lake Biological Station. This is an intensive three-week field course, where students live and learn at the station, which is isolated on a mountain in southwestern Virginia. In other words, this is the perfect context for incorporating research into a biology course. The very first time that I taught this course back in 2016, I split the class of eleven students into three different groups, and each group devised their own research project. As I recall, one group studied aversive behavior in bullfrog and green frog tadpoles, another studied courtship behaviors in red-spotted newts, and the last group studied diet and behavior of garter snakes. I have to recall this because while valuable as a learning tool, none of these projects resulted in enough high-quality data for a scientific manuscript. I found that with multiple projects, neither myself or the TA (yes I had a TA for eleven students) had enough time to really vet and help design the research, and the students did not have enough time to collect enough data for a publication, regardless of the project design. Based on this experience, I completely overhauled how I approach these class projects, which has generally (but not always!) been more successful.
My general approach to devising a research project is to first come up with the skeleton of an idea prior to the class period. I do this by chatting the concept over with collaborators (my former postdoc Ian Clifton, now an assistant prof at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, or my collaborators Mike Logan at UNR and Alison Davis Rabosky at the University of Michigan, all of which have coauthored class projects with me) or with the TA. One of the great pleasures in my life has been teaching Field Herpetology at Mountain Lake Biological Station with Albert Chung, who was an M.S. student of mine at Georgia Southern and has TAed (and now co-instructed) the MLBS course since 2017. By coming up with the general idea we can do the groundwork to make sure that the basic idea is a sound one. Of course, we then do all of the necessary parts of research in the class to give the students ownership of the concept, but I have found that students prefer to be given a starting idea that we can then elaborate on as a class. We also only attempt a single project for each class, which helps us to meet sample size goals and ensure publishable results.
Beyond the project idea, the other aspect that I have found to be crucial is selection of the research system. When I first started teaching at MLBS, I thought perhaps the class projects would be on salamanders, which are by far the most abundant vertebrates on the station. However, salamanders have been the focus of research at MLBS for decades, and so a lot of the low hanging fruit has already been plucked by previous researchers. Additionally, while I almost studied salamanders for my dissertation, and have been involved with some research on salamanders (my only species description is a salamander from northern Mexico), they are not the focus of my research, which means that it was more difficult to come up with a good research idea that could be done as part of a project for which we only really had a couple of weeks. There are plenty of other herps at MLBS of course, such as garter snakes and water snakes, but many of those have also been fairly well-studied or had logistical issues associated with them. I was lamenting the lack of a place where we could get some more interesting animals, maybe even snakes, at MLBS to the director Butch Brodie (who is a herpetologist as well as a coleopterologist, among many other things), and he told me of a rocky hillside near the station that looked good for snakes. I checked it out, and sure enough, there were plenty of ring-necked snakes, which are not well studied, particularly in this location. Almost every project at MLBS since then has studied some aspect of the biology of ring-necked snakes.
Another important consideration for authentic course-based research is what kind of data you want to collect. For me, the key considerations are that 1) data must be simple to collect, preferably without specialized equipment that requires training and might breakdown and 2) all data collection and processing must happen during class times. When I have attempted research that relied upon post-processing of images or other data types, the research has inevitably stalled because there is no-one to process the data, and real-time checks of data quality cannot happen. What this means is that I have done lots of thermal biology projects and behavioral research, because the data can be easy to collect, and interpretation is straightforward. This of course reflects my own background and interests.
How and if you can incorporate research into your course also depends on the institutional context. It is worth pointing out that I also taught herpetology at Georgia Southern University for several years and never incorporated research into the course. Why is that? Well, while there are plenty of critters on the Georgia Southern campus that we could study, none of them were really abundant enough where I could see developing a successful research project. Beyond my course at MLBS, I have also incorporated authentic research into my semester-long Herpetology course at FIU. The class project is the centerpiece of the required laboratory, and while we have less time per class, we have a whole semester to complete the project. There are at least nine species of lizards on campus that we could use for our research project, and our work thus far has focused on two of the most abundant species on campus (brown anoles and bark anoles).
I hope that the lessons that I have learned about incorporating authentic scientific research into Herpetology might prove useful to anybody who is interested in this approach. I have found that there have been several hidden benefits for me. One of them is that I keep better contact with students after the course, and I can write better and more-informed letters of recommendation. Another is that most of my current research focuses on anole lizards, but my roots are in studies of snake biology. Working on ringnecked snakes as part of class research at MLBS has allowed me to have a research program focused on snakes, at least for three weeks per year, which has been fulfilling.
Of course, most laboratory classes in biology involve research, but most research in these laboratories has a predetermined outcome (at least if the lab goes well!), and involves following a pretty strict protocol. I have taught those type of laboratories and classes, and I think they are the right choice for the priorities in certain course. However, when I speak of integrating “authentic” research into courses, that is not what I am describing. Nor am I thinking of small-scale individual or small-group projects that are unlikely to be able to satisfactorily answer any scientific question. Rather, I mean “authentic” research in that we do not know the answer to the research question, we design the study and experiments together as a class, and we aim for enough replication to end up with a publishable chunk of research, with all of the students coauthors on and contributors to the resulting manuscript.
What are the benefits of incorporating authentic research into your classes? Well, for the instructor, this can help generate data for research productivity (not a factor at an R1, but could be important for positions where the teaching load is substantial) and make instruction more immediate, concrete, and compelling. But generally, incorporating research in this way is a lot more work for the instructor, and the real benefit is to the students. Students that participate in these sorts of classes get improved learning outcomes, realistic research experience, and may even get to be a coauthor on a scientific publication. We know that research experiences can improve social understanding of science, increase representation of under-represented groups, and help students get into graduate school (either in biology or medical school or similar). However, most students attend public institutions and will not be able to work in a laboratory. Course based research expands access to research in a way that I find satisfying, although it by no means solves the access issue.
I have been integrating authentic research into Field Herpetology classes at Mountain Lake Biological Station since I first taught the class in 2016, and in my Herpetology class at FIU since 2021. So what I will be describing is what works for me. However, I do think that what will work can vary a lot across types of institutions and courses (i.e., I have only integrated research into an upper-level organismal course with limited enrollment). Also, I think my approach works because I like writing papers a lot, and rarely is anyone else interested in being the first author. This is not a humble-brag- just because I like it does not mean I am good at it, and I like writing any sort of paper, regardless of impact. In fact, I regularly procrastinate by writing a modest paper when I should be working on grant proposals or more difficult, higher impact papers. Some scientists are more motivated by other aspects of the research process but don’t love writing, and if you are that sort of scientist, it is unlikely that you will motivate yourself to write up a class project for publication. Regardless, I am just trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive, when I discuss how these courses work for me.
The first place where I tried to integrate authentic research into a course was my Field Herpetology class at Mountain Lake Biological Station. This is an intensive three-week field course, where students live and learn at the station, which is isolated on a mountain in southwestern Virginia. In other words, this is the perfect context for incorporating research into a biology course. The very first time that I taught this course back in 2016, I split the class of eleven students into three different groups, and each group devised their own research project. As I recall, one group studied aversive behavior in bullfrog and green frog tadpoles, another studied courtship behaviors in red-spotted newts, and the last group studied diet and behavior of garter snakes. I have to recall this because while valuable as a learning tool, none of these projects resulted in enough high-quality data for a scientific manuscript. I found that with multiple projects, neither myself or the TA (yes I had a TA for eleven students) had enough time to really vet and help design the research, and the students did not have enough time to collect enough data for a publication, regardless of the project design. Based on this experience, I completely overhauled how I approach these class projects, which has generally (but not always!) been more successful.
My general approach to devising a research project is to first come up with the skeleton of an idea prior to the class period. I do this by chatting the concept over with collaborators (my former postdoc Ian Clifton, now an assistant prof at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, or my collaborators Mike Logan at UNR and Alison Davis Rabosky at the University of Michigan, all of which have coauthored class projects with me) or with the TA. One of the great pleasures in my life has been teaching Field Herpetology at Mountain Lake Biological Station with Albert Chung, who was an M.S. student of mine at Georgia Southern and has TAed (and now co-instructed) the MLBS course since 2017. By coming up with the general idea we can do the groundwork to make sure that the basic idea is a sound one. Of course, we then do all of the necessary parts of research in the class to give the students ownership of the concept, but I have found that students prefer to be given a starting idea that we can then elaborate on as a class. We also only attempt a single project for each class, which helps us to meet sample size goals and ensure publishable results.
Beyond the project idea, the other aspect that I have found to be crucial is selection of the research system. When I first started teaching at MLBS, I thought perhaps the class projects would be on salamanders, which are by far the most abundant vertebrates on the station. However, salamanders have been the focus of research at MLBS for decades, and so a lot of the low hanging fruit has already been plucked by previous researchers. Additionally, while I almost studied salamanders for my dissertation, and have been involved with some research on salamanders (my only species description is a salamander from northern Mexico), they are not the focus of my research, which means that it was more difficult to come up with a good research idea that could be done as part of a project for which we only really had a couple of weeks. There are plenty of other herps at MLBS of course, such as garter snakes and water snakes, but many of those have also been fairly well-studied or had logistical issues associated with them. I was lamenting the lack of a place where we could get some more interesting animals, maybe even snakes, at MLBS to the director Butch Brodie (who is a herpetologist as well as a coleopterologist, among many other things), and he told me of a rocky hillside near the station that looked good for snakes. I checked it out, and sure enough, there were plenty of ring-necked snakes, which are not well studied, particularly in this location. Almost every project at MLBS since then has studied some aspect of the biology of ring-necked snakes.
Another important consideration for authentic course-based research is what kind of data you want to collect. For me, the key considerations are that 1) data must be simple to collect, preferably without specialized equipment that requires training and might breakdown and 2) all data collection and processing must happen during class times. When I have attempted research that relied upon post-processing of images or other data types, the research has inevitably stalled because there is no-one to process the data, and real-time checks of data quality cannot happen. What this means is that I have done lots of thermal biology projects and behavioral research, because the data can be easy to collect, and interpretation is straightforward. This of course reflects my own background and interests.
How and if you can incorporate research into your course also depends on the institutional context. It is worth pointing out that I also taught herpetology at Georgia Southern University for several years and never incorporated research into the course. Why is that? Well, while there are plenty of critters on the Georgia Southern campus that we could study, none of them were really abundant enough where I could see developing a successful research project. Beyond my course at MLBS, I have also incorporated authentic research into my semester-long Herpetology course at FIU. The class project is the centerpiece of the required laboratory, and while we have less time per class, we have a whole semester to complete the project. There are at least nine species of lizards on campus that we could use for our research project, and our work thus far has focused on two of the most abundant species on campus (brown anoles and bark anoles).
I hope that the lessons that I have learned about incorporating authentic scientific research into Herpetology might prove useful to anybody who is interested in this approach. I have found that there have been several hidden benefits for me. One of them is that I keep better contact with students after the course, and I can write better and more-informed letters of recommendation. Another is that most of my current research focuses on anole lizards, but my roots are in studies of snake biology. Working on ringnecked snakes as part of class research at MLBS has allowed me to have a research program focused on snakes, at least for three weeks per year, which has been fulfilling.
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