Paper Title: Assessment of Student and Teacher Perceptions on the Use of Virtual Simulation in Cell Biology Laboratory Education 

Author(s) and Year: Navarro, Cristina, Manuel Arias-Calderón, Carolina A. Henríquez, and Paula Riquelme. 2024. 

Journal: Education Sciences (open access)

TL;DR: First-year undergraduate biology students helped researchers test virtual laboratory simulations for a cell biology course. Although both students and teachers acknowledged virtual laboratories cannot replace in-person activities, they agreed that the activities improved subject matter knowledge and increased student interest in cell biology. 

Why I chose this paper: During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the intro to bioengineering class I TA’d had to adjust all of our laboratory activities to be done by students at home using take-home kits. Because of that experience, I was curious how online labs could potentially supplement in-person experiments, or even replace them in some cases.

Hologram labs may still be a thing of science fiction, but scientists at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile recently found that virtual labs can improve student engagement and conceptual understanding of their course material. After usage of virtual labs skyrocketed in popularity during COVID-19 lockdowns, scientists began wondering how these virtual labs could be used alongside—or even instead of—traditional labs to improve student learning.

The Background

While virtual labs have been in use since the 1990s, COVID-19 lockdowns made them a necessity. Their widespread adoption resulted in an increase in interest from educators and scientists in how virtual labs can best be used to improve science education. By their nature, virtual labs offer different advantages and challenges compared to physical labs: they don’t require expensive or hazardous chemicals or equipment and are adaptable to many topics of study, but do require sufficient internet access, computing power, and device compatibility. Also, virtual labs don’t give students practice in hands-on lab skills, such as pipetting, which is important for certain fields.

Studies have shown that virtual labs can help improve understanding of subject material, but scientists and teachers are still working to understand if virtual labs are best applied alone or in conjunction with in person labs. In this study, by integrating virtual labs into a first-year cell biology curriculum and surveying the students and teachers that used them, the researchers were able to get a sense for how the virtual labs were viewed in the classroom. Both students and teachers were generally positive about the virtual labs, and saw them as effective supplementary tools that can aid learning. At the same time, they also acknowledged the known limitations of virtual labs compared to in-person labs.

The Methods

Scientists adapted a cell biology course made up of 400 first-year undergraduate students to incorporate virtual lab activities into half of the curriculum, with the other half maintaining the original hands-on labs. The virtual labs were done remotely and synchronously, with teacher support and detailed guides on use of the simulators. 

At the end of the semester, the researchers surveyed the group of students and collected 340 responses, which they analyzed to determine various aspects of how students felt about the labs, including their ease of use, effects on students’ attitudes, and how well the students felt that they learned. Teachers were also interviewed periodically throughout the course to gain another set of perspectives. Their responses were summarized and categorized by the research team, and the researchers selected quotes from teachers that best represented their responses as a whole to cite in the study.

The Results

Students generally felt positively about the integration of virtual labs into their cell biology course. Over 80% of them reported that the virtual labs increased both their interest and their motivation in cell biology. The teachers generally agreed with the students’ perceptions, adding that the virtual labs seemed to improve how well students understood the cell biology topics. In fact, they reported that the virtual labs helped students come to class with a pre-existing familiarity with terms and concepts indicating that a flipped-classroom style of learning, in which students learn the basic material at home and engage in deeper learning and discussion during class time, may be facilitated by virtual lab activities. 

Even so, some teachers expressed concern that learning in a virtual environment may require a certain degree of maturity and self-discipline from students to properly carry out the virtual lab activities without direct supervision. Another downside, noted by both students and teachers, is that virtual labs require both a reliable internet connection and a laptop or desktop computer, which not all students may have. Teachers noted that students with poor internet connections took longer to complete the labs and that students with certain devices ran into more technical problems. Both could impede the overall experience of the lab activity. 

In addition, although a strong majority of students saw the benefit of the virtual labs, fewer—around 72%—considered them to be a complete substitute for more traditional, hands-on labs activities. Similarly, teachers were doubtful about the virtual labs’ ability to build practical lab skills. 

Based on the survey and interview responses, the study authors concluded that virtual labs may be best utilized as an accompaniment to in-person lab work or in a flipped-classroom setting. 

The Impact 

Although we have largely returned to in-person classes, virtual labs may still be useful because they offer access to experiments at lower costs, can be done from anywhere, and allow students a space to more safely make mistakes and learn from them. According to the researchers, future studies could optimize the use of virtual labs in conjunction with in-person labs. 

Provided that efforts are made to ensure that students are supplied with equitable access to suitable computers and the internet, virtual labs as they stand right now could be an important educational tool to improve learning and interest in biology. Building student engagement is a critical component of ensuring that students are able and willing to pursue careers in science. Virtual labs can also provide learning opportunities for those who lack access to appropriate in-person lab facilities.

Written by Katelyn Miyasaki

Edited by Krystal Vasquez

Featured image credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash