Instructional labs are widely seen as a unique, albeit expensive, way to teach scientific content. We measured the effectiveness of introductory lab courses at achieving this educational goal across nine different lab courses at three very different institutions. These institutions and courses encompassed a broad range of student populations and instructional styles. The nine courses studied had two key things in common: the labs aimed to reinforce the content presented in lectures, and the labs were optional. By comparing the performance of students who did and did not take the labs (with careful normalization for selection effects), we found universally and precisely no added value to learning course content from taking the labs as measured by course exam performance. This work should motivate institutions and departments to reexamine the goals and conduct of their lab courses, given their resource-intensive nature. We show why these results make sense when looking at the comparative mental processes of students involved in research and instructional labs, and offer alternative goals and instructional approaches that would make lab courses more educationally valuable.

In 1993, then OSU President John Byrne declared that: “All Extension Service faculty, county agents as well as specialists, will be assigned academic colleges, and will have an academic appointment in the appropriate college.” The selection of the academic home would involve a mutual agreement between the individual and the department and would take into consideration the faculty member's academic training, experience, and work assignment. The implementation of this decision was completed by July 1995. In the College of Agricultural Sciences, this assignment of faculty to academic homes was accommodated by adding county agents to the faculty of existing departments. The Dept. of Horticulture faculty numbers nearly doubled, with an increase from 34 to 58. The department head is now very involved in the annual review and salary administration of extension field faculty. Campus-based faculty are now involved in all of the hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions for extension field faculty and vice versa. Field faculty participate in departmental decision making. The change in the number and diversity of faculty in the department is a unique effort to unify programmatic focus for extension, research, and teaching at OSU. As a work in progress, many issues are being addressed including full faculty participation in the decision-making process, communication, evaluation of scholarship, and building departmental community. Successes, pitfalls, and challenges ahead will be discussed and illustrated.