Course data and contact information

Official description (published in UW Time Schedule)

Expanded description

The 5-week land component of the course begins with a series of presentations from local scientists involved in the research theme that will anchor the course. Their presentations emphasize background information, recent results, and controversies, and are designed to nurture your curiosities and help you learn to pose scientific questions fearlessly. Over a 3-week period, you refine your questions into a research proposal through an iterative process that includes library research, critical analysis of scientific literature, daily exchanges of ideas with your peers, and weekly consultation with a scientist/mentor. After peer review and revision of the proposals in week 4, students and faculty collaborate during the final week on land to create a science plan that will accomplish all individual research projects during the upcoming sea component.

The sea component begins with safety and sail training and then centers on accomplishing the group science plan. During the first 2 weeks at sea, you observe and experiment intensely. About half way through the cruise, your first priority will shift from observation to data analysis, interpretation of results, and preparation of final written and oral reports. Opportunities for constructive feedback from peers are built into the daily afternoon class, which also includes mini-lectures on topics related to the research theme from faculty, staff, or visiting scientists. Frequent meetings with mentors will help you achieve the goal of presenting your original findings in a public forum during the final week.

The course emphasizes scientific communication and may satisfy writing requirements at your university or college. You practice communicating through reading scientific literature, writing scientific proposals and papers, presenting research results to a scientific audience, and describing your scientific experience to a general audience through logbook entries. On average, an hour a day is devoted to developing communications skills. Typical structured activities are discussing readings from the primary literature (journal club) and sharing feedback with peers and faculty on compositions or presentations.

Course objectives

• Complete each step in a 10-week research collaboration with peers and a scientific mentor -- from initial questions and proposals on land, through data collection and analysis at sea, to final papers and presentations in the destination port.
• Gain a basic understanding of the oceanic environment, marine ecosystems, and human interaction with the sea.

Intended student learning outcomes

1. Become more curious, constructively skeptical, and fearless in questioning
2. Formulate a question that can be answered or addressed through scientific processes
3. Generate a compelling proposal, present it to peers, and revise it in response to their comments
4. Critique proposals constructively and create a group science plan through cooperation and collaboration
5. Be facile with basic software used by scientists to prepare written documents
6. Collaborate with peers to accomplish individual and group goals simultaneously
7. Sail, navigate, solve problems, and make observations aboard a research vessel (that demonstrates sustainable technologies)
8. Analyze data using basic statistical and computational methods/tools
9. Distill published literature and new results into written/oral presentations
10. Search, read, and analyze scientific literature
11. Accelerate personal growth, adapt to group dynamics, and observe the environment through journaling and reflection with a mentor
12. Utilize a structured process for writing scientific proposals and publications

Course format

Learning activities

• Guest presentations and discussions of the group research theme
• Attend an "official" scientific presentation and ask a meaningful question
• Library research
• Practice posing questions
• Develop proposal for individual research through consultation with mentor
• Review proposals of others
• Generate a group science plan
• Introduction to vessel operation and equipment
• Intensive field research
• On-board analysis and interpretation of data
• On-board preparation of written and oral results
• Daily interpretation of environmental data collected automatically along Beam Reach ship tracks
• Article analysis and presentation
• Proposals (scientific, technological, and service)
• Proposal review(s)
• Group science plan
• Paper revisions and final draft
• Public presentation
• Blogbook

Learning assessment tasks (evaluation and grading)

1. faculty assessment of inquisitiveness during mentoring meetings and group activities
2. faculty assessment of questions posed in final research proposal based on questions rubric
3. faculty and peer grading of final research proposal and its presentation based on proposal rubric
4. faculty and peer grading of performance during proposal review and generation of an integrated (group) science plan
5. peer assessment of individual contributions to realizing the group science plan
6. pass performance tasks related to small boats during land component; captain and watch leader assessment of vessel management skill acquisition during sea component
7. faculty and peer judgments based on data analysis and presentation rubrics applied during daily reports (science)
8. peer review of manuscript drafts and final presentations
9. faculty assessment of improvement between iterations of paper and presentation
10. faculty and peer rating of retrieval, analysis, and presentation of an article at the weekly journal club; successful generation of a bibliography (using bibtex format) in the final paper
11. faculty assessment of progress relative to personal goals based on weekly meetings with student; peer response to on-line journal
12. faculty and peer review of research proposals (and faculty assessment of improvement between multiple drafts)
13. peer review of manuscripts; peer assessment of response to reviews
14. faculty, peer, and public review of final presentations;
15. for advanced students: results of submittal to a peer-reviewed journal for publication

Course content

• Readings and presentations focused on group research theme
• Readings, methods, and exercises for refining individual research questions
• Scientific literature related to individual research topics
• Real examples of good/poor proposals and papers
• Real examples of good/poor reviewer comments and editorial practice
• Readings and presentations related to individual and group research themes
• Guides to on-board scientific methodology, record keeping, and observational techniques
• Readings on sources of error in scientific data collection
• Guides to on-board data analysis and display techniques
• Examples of excellence in data presentation (excerpts from Tufte texts)
• Mini-lectures on topics relevant to research theme or local environment delivered during daily class meeting
• Examples of NSF and other professional proposals
• Epitomes of well- and poorly-written scientific articles
• Strategies for modern library literature searches
• Excerpts from scientific writing process guide (composition, editing)
• Rubrics and checklists for good writing, proposals, reviews, and presentations
• Bibliographic databases and tools
• Introduction to scientific type-setting software and journal formats

Text(s) and required materials

None. Scientific literature and reserved texts will be available through the library of the Friday Harbor Laboratories.