FAQ
- What is SERTS?
- How is a SERTS workshop different from a traditional laboratory course?
- What do you do in SERTS?
- How am I graded for a SERTS workshop?
- How can you benefit from SERTS?
- What do students say about SERTS?
- How do I enroll in a SERTS class?
The classic laboratory course for undergraduate students focuses on teaching selected methodological and technical information in the context of a specific subject. A well-designed laboratory course also introduces students to the process of formulating and testing hypotheses. This is usually done in a teaching laboratory designed for 20-30 students which is taught by a single teaching assistant. Unfortunately, the more general ideas of why a certain question was identified as being worthy of research or how a discovery was made are often lost to the students as they struggle to work out the technical details of the exercise of the week.
The object of SERTS is to provide the skills needed to help people understand why research is done in the first place. The ability to understand how researchers determine whether a question is significant and worthy of further investigation is critical to people who will be making decisions about science and technology in business, government, or as voters participating in our democracy. The objective of SERTS is to provide students with the tools to think critically, to understand the process that is used to identify a significant question, to understand how discoveries are made, and to know how the information derived from those discoveries moves from the bench top to society. For this reason, SERTS workshops are designed as small groups (3-6 students) which are lead by people who are actually doing the hands on research in a real research laboratory. The projects they will be describing to you are their research projects which are contributing to new discoveries.
