I have found this aspect of integrating the WWW into biology courses one of the most positive for students. Students use freshly prepared slides to count the numbers of cells in interphase and in each stage of mitosis, and to calculate a mitotic index. Their lab reports inevitably attribute this difference to experimenter error. Despite the fact that these students generate hypotheses, design and conduct experiments, analyze data, and then compare those data with published results, if their results differ from those published, they conclude that they failed because they are only students, not scientists. These attitudes change when they compare their data with other student-generated data and find no significant differences.
Students then begin to think of themselves as scientists.
Posting student-generated data on the WWW helps biology educators teach students to become scientists. In an attempt to determine if students view the integration of the WWW and Internet into biology courses as valuable, I surveyed two primarily non-majors biology courses during the 1996 summer session and two majors biology courses during the fall 1996. I made no attempt to separate non-majors responses from majors responses for this analysis. The few students who did not like using the WWW indicated that the problem was lack of access to adequate computer facilities. Those students who did not like using email identified the lack of word-processing power in the SMTP mail editor as the major problem.