Career Connections at SAVY Saturday, Week 3, Neuroscience at Work (7th-8th)
Our last day of class was, without a doubt, the most exciting!
After a brief recap of what we covered last week, we jumped right into learning about the basics of conducting ethical research. Our researchers (your students) developed short scripts to ensure their protocols followed the key principles all researchers are expected to abide by, such as respect for others, beneficence, and justice.
Once our researchers were familiar with their research protocols and testing materials, we began our day of data collection! Thanks to the efforts of our fantastic SAVY staff, our researchers were able to work with dozens of participants from across 7 SAVY classes! We had several studies that collected data from over 40 participants.
This was a hands-off activity for me, meaning each researcher was completely responsible for conducting their study from start to finish. I was so impressed with the level of professionalism displayed by everyone. Not everything went according to plan, but there was so much to be learned about the scientific process from this! Some of our guest students declined to participate; others were less than attentive participants, but your researchers maintained their composure through it all. I was immensely proud of everyone! They worked so hard on their research studies, and they were a major success.
Our day wrapped up with some basic data analysis and the creation of research posters. It was so much fun interpreting and representing our findings visually with graphs. Be sure to ask your researcher about the experiments they designed and to walk you through their poster if they were able to create one.
It was such a pleasure to teach your students over the last few weekends and watch them develop into neuroscience researchers!
Your instructor,
Israel Flores, PhD