How to Do Science in Ten Weeks: Integrating Scientific Communication into a Senior Undergraduate Instrumentation Class

Undergraduate atmospheric instrumentation is a critical course: a certain number of course-hours in instrumentation are required both by the AMS and by the National Weather Service. These courses are taught in a wide variety of ways from institution to institution: they may be integrated with more general geophysical instrumentation classes, they may involve building and testing of instruments, they may be primarily based on analysis and a deep understanding of the acquisition of preexisting datasets, or some combination of all of these. At the University of Washington's Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science, this senior undergraduate course is further complicated by the quarter system: after only ten weeks of instruction, students must meet learning objectives and be prepared to take their instrumentation knowledge with them into the workplace.

Critical to success in any job even tangentially related to atmospheric sciences is communication: academia, public, and private sectors all require the delivery of scientific knowledge via journal articles, presentations, white papers and/or technical memos. In the UW's senior-level undergraduate atmospheric instrumentation class, students go through the scientific process from end to end: they first learn the theory and practice of measurement and error, gaining understanding of each scientific instrument contained on a portable weather station. They then deploy said stations to create a "micronet" of observations across the Seattle area and gather data, learning to deal with the odd instrument failure or data outage along the way. These observations are then pooled among the class, during which time students learn about the ups and downs of scientific collaboration - for instance, if one group has misread instructions and taken measurements every two minutes rather than every five minutes, how can this discrepancy best be resolved?

Once datasets have been quality-controlled and integrated by students, they dive into statistics and learn how to set up a framework for basic exploratory data analysis, winnowing down a massive amount of information into a manageable, interesting story. Students then present their analyses in conference-style presentations, featuring a Q&A session among their classmates and the instructor and receiving feedback on both the scientific content and the presentation itself. Finally, students write up a brief summary of their results using scientific writing structure (abstract-introduction-methods-results-discussion-conclusions), and are then coached on the tenets of effective peer review, providing constructive comments to their classmates and receiving the same. A revised draft that incorporates the peer review comments is the capstone for the course, completing the end-to-end scientific learning.

Student feedback has been positive, highlighting the number of skills they would not have formally learned otherwise in their undergraduate career, but the schedule is tight and the required time invested by the instructor to keep everything and everyone on track is much higher than normal for a senior-level undergraduate class. This course is under constant development; in this presentation I hope to express the successes, but also the ongoing struggles that emerge when teaching so many broader skillsets alongside specific objectives related to theoretical and practical knowledge of atmospheric measurements in such a short time.