Data for: Integrating open education practices with data analysis of open science in an undergraduate course
Creators: name: Bakermans, Marja
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: Data repository
Open access publishing
primary literature
SALG
Pedagogy

description: The open science movement produces vast quantities of openly published data connected to journal articles, creating an enormous resource for educators to engage students in current topics and analyses. However, educators face challenges using these materials to meet course objectives. I present a case study using open science (published articles and their corresponding datasets) and open educational practices in a capstone course. While engaging in current topics of conservation, students trace connections in the research process, learn statistical analyses, and recreate analyses using the programming language R. I assessed the presence of best practices in open articles and datasets, examined student selection in the open grading policy, surveyed students on their perceived learning gains, and conducted a thematic analysis on student reflections. First, articles and datasets met just over half of the assessed fairness practices, but this increased with the publication date. There was a marginal difference in how assessment categories were weighted by students, with reflections highlighting appreciation for student agency. In course content, students reported the greatest learning gains in describing variables, while collaborative activities (e.g., interacting with peers and instructor) were the most effective support. The most effective tasks to facilitate these learning gains included coding exercises and team-led assignments. Autocoding of student reflections identified 16 themes, and positive sentiments were written nearly 4x more often than negative sentiments. Students positively reflected on their growth in statistical analyses, and negative sentiments focused on how limited prior experience with statistics and coding made them feel nervous. As a group, we encountered several challenges and opportunities in using open science materials. I present key recommendations, based on student experiences, for scientists to consider when publishing open data to provide additional educational benefits to the open science community.
description: Article and dataset fairness

To assess the utility of open articles and their datasets as an educational tool in an undergraduate academic setting, I measured the congruence of each pair to a set of best practices and guiding principles. I assessed ten guiding principles and best practices (Table 1), where each category was scored '1' or '0' based on whether it met that criteria, with a total possible score of ten.

Open grading policies

Students were allowed to specify the percentage weight for each assessment category in the course, including 1) six coding exercises (Exercises), 2) one lead exercise (Lead Exercise), 3) fourteen annotation assignments of readings (Annotations), 4) one final project (Final Project), 5) five discussion board posts and a statement of learning reflection (Discussion), and 6) attendance and participation (Participation). I examined if assessment categories (independent variable) were weighted (dependent variable) differently by students using an analysis of variance (ANOVA) and examined pairwise differences with Tukey HSD.

Assessment of perceived learning gains

I used a student assessment of learning gains (SALG) survey to measure students' perceptions of learning gains related to course objectives (Seymour et al. 2000). This Likert-scale survey provided five response categories ranging from 'no gains' to 'great gains' in learning and the option of open responses in each category. A summary report that converted Likert responses to numbers and calculated descriptive statistics was produced from the SALG instrument website. 

Student reflections 

In student reflections, I examined the frequency of the 100 most frequent words, with stop words excluded and a minimum length of four (letters), both "with synonyms" and "with generalizations". Due to this paper's explorative nature, I used autocoding to identify students' broad themes and sentiments in their reflections. Autocoding examines the sentiment of each word and scores it as positive, neutral, mixed, or negative. In this process, I compared how students felt about each theme, focusing on positive (i.e., satisfaction) and negative (i.e., dissatisfaction) sentiments. The relationship of how sentiment was coded to themes was visualized in a treemap, where the size of a block is relative to the number of references for that code. All reflection processing and analyses were performed in NVivo 14 (Windows).

All data were collected with institutional IRB approval (IRB-24–0314). All statistical analyses were performed in R (ver. 4.3.1; R Core Team 2023).