Director of Education, Research and Clinical Outreach Oregon Health & Science University Portland, Oregon
Background: OHSU Librarians direct a one-credit course in the Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences, intended to provide Ph.D. students with an understanding of the factors that influence data rigor and reproducibility and the practices and resources they can use to engage to enhance the rigor and reproducibility of their work and research. While the course content leveraged Rigor and Reproducibility training materials and intended learning outcomes created by the National Institutes of Health, the course directors substantially updated and supplemented this content with information and goals more explicitly aligned with a basic science research context.
Description: In the Fall term of 2021, the course directors piloted a final project and assessment framework that encouraged students to explore and express their learning through a creative project. The students were given the freedom to select any one or combination of topics relevant to rigor and reproducibility and produce any original work that demonstrated their understanding. The assignment was inspired by a thread published on Twitter by Dr. Robin Tinghitella describing how she replaced final exams with “not-tests” and sharing examples of student work. Like Dr. Tinghitella, the students in the Rigor and Reproducibility course explored various topics, and their outputs were diverse and inventive. They included haikus, comics, annotated data management plans, blog posts, and memes, to name a few. Moreover, the instructors gained a deep and concrete understanding of the students’ learning.
Conclusion: Having had a positive experience with piloting this assessment technique, the course directors are now interested in contextualizing the approach within the literature, especially the concept of teaching and assessing creativity in the sciences and information literacy. We will describe the results of our literature review and synthesize the evidence base for using creativity in higher education. We will reflect on and relate our own experiences and compare them with recent papers discussing similar approaches, especially those where student feedback is included. We hope this work will enhance our creativity in the classroom, enhance student learning, and provide inspiration for other medical librarians and health sciences educators.
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