Improving openness: a survey to understand the student perspective

Posted: by Mia Rozenbaum on 29/07/24

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Improving openness: a survey to understand the student perspective

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection,” wrote Mark Twain, words that the University of Hertfordshire (UH) have taken to heart and applied to their openness programme.  

Since signing the Concordat on Openness in 2018, the University of Hertfordshire has implemented a variety of outreach initiatives from case studies on their public website to lab tours and ‘3Rs at UH’ events at annual research conferences directed towards their students and staff. The goal has been to increase openness and transparency about the wide range of research-informed teaching and initiatives that go on at the university including, but not limited to, animal research.  

As part of the push for greater openness, the university decided to survey its undergraduate bioscience students to better understand their perspective on openness, to discover where the university’s openness programme needed improvement, and what it could do better. Dr Lisa Lione, Associate Director of the Doctoral College and Associate Professor in translational pharmacology research at the university, explained that the aim of the survey was to “ask our undergraduate bio-scientists how clear we are about when, how and why we use animals as part of their research-informed teaching at UH and what their priority ethical considerations and responsibilities are, to inform our concordat on openness agenda.” 

The anonymous survey was embedded within the students’ teaching programme as part of an ‘ethics in science’ workshop that helps them prepare for their own dissertation research project. Dr Lione, who runs the workshop, explains: “We discuss animal and non-animal research and evaluate the students’ awareness of the benefits of the research being done at UH. The workshop allows them to consider the 3Rs and leads to revealing discussions surrounding the importance of their own studies.”  

Around 60 students answered the survey and “it gave really useful feedback with an undergraduate perspective to improve our openness and engagement activities moving forward.” As it turned out, despite openness efforts, and their bioscience background, many students weren’t aware of the animal research happening at the university. 

“It really depends on what they have been taught earlier in their education and whether they’ve covered ethics and animal research in their school or college. It’s important for us to know, so we can be clearer in our programme specifications, open days and student briefings. A briefing on the concordat, 3Rs and the when, how and why of animals in research and teaching is covered at student induction but we need to endorse it more,” commented Dr Lione. “Getting feedback from the students was really valuable. The survey helped formulate key recommendations to improve what we are already doing on our webpages, and during tutorials and practicals, but also gave us ideas.” 

Ideas such as, inclusion of a tutorial in undergraduate and masters taught programmes signposting students to visit the UH animal research webpages and debate 3Rs and animal research in a tutorial group setting in relation to their study. More emphasis is now placed on voicing the university’s 3Rs policy with an ‘ethics and consideration of 3Rs’ statement in all practical proformas so students can see how they meet their learning objectives in line with the 3Rs throughout their programme of study. “We extensively use and develop alternatives to animals in practicals in line with the 3R of replacement. For example, students use jelly babies as a ‘tissue model’ to learn how to paraffin wax embed tissues, use cooked pasta to simulate and learn to thread muscles, use photographs of biological cells/tissues from published literature / biobanked samples to image process, diagnose and quantify disease, use computer models for measuring action potentials, drug efficacy, dosing regimens and animal behaviour. If these replacement 3Rs practicals are not highlighted, students often don’t realise that they would otherwise need to use animals. It’s important they see this,” says Dr Lione.   

The idea is to re-run this ethics survey every other year to reveal the impact of these new and improved measures and to inform future implementations. “It was a really good exercise to do,” says Dr Lione, “it enables our programmes to stay current, be topical, and evolve. We plan to open it up wider, to include professional staff, senior leaders and patient interest groups.”  

The university won an openness award in 2023 for this project. The judges were impressed that the university recognised the need for internal engagement through a variety of approaches, particularly through efforts made to survey students to understand their perspective on openness and what the university can do better to support this. 

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Last edited: 29 July 2024 16:15

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