An Approach to Improve Laboratory Notebook Feedback and Decrease Instructor Fatigue from Grading Undergraduate Laboratory Notebooks

Proper laboratory notebook maintenance is a critical skill for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workers. Laboratory notebook grading can be time-consuming and lead to instructor fatigue. After many hours of grading laboratory notebooks, instructors can become biased or not provide detailed feedback to students. I developed a simple protocol to alleviate these problems. Students maintained a laboratory notebook typical for most STEM courses. Then, they were given a short quiz with laboratory-specific questions and could only use their notebooks to answer. The presence or absence of major notebook sections (date, introduction, etc.) were checked, and the laboratory notebook score was a combination of these two components. The learning gains were not assessed, but the instructor grading time decreased by 80%. This technique was applied to both in-person and concurrent online laboratories. With the ever-increasing demands on instructors, anything that decreases the instructor workload and the time for students to receive feedback will likely lead to a better classroom environment.