Hot off the digital press…the results of the 2017 HAPS laboratory instructor survey are now available to HAPS members in a Special Edition of HAPS Educator. My thanks to all of you who participated in either the 2014 or the 2017 surveys. This year, we received over 560 submissions from 470 institutions over a two-month period. That’s more than four times the number of participants and more than five times the number of institutions than we had in 2014, and in half the time! Special thanks to the ADInstruments team for their suggested survey improvements and sponsoring the Amazon gift card drawing for our survey participants.
The report, Instructional Goals and Practices in the Introductory Undergraduate Pre-Health Professions Anatomy and Physiology Laboratory, contains all the 2016 survey data alongside the quantitative results from the 2014 report. The report is hefty with 21 data tables; however, it was important to share all the data we collected in a peer-reviewed and published format rather than just summarizing a few key findings. The report includes data on the participant population, institutional and program practices, and the instructional goals and practices in the A&P laboratory. I expect you’ll find the data in this report very helpful if you are needing to benchmark your current laboratory practices against the national trends. I also see the report as a foundation for our discussions on what our laboratory practices should be in the future.
I look forward to discussing the survey results and our next steps with y’all in Salt Lake City. I’ll be at the poster session during the update seminar portion of the annual meeting and I’m leading a workshop later in the conference. If you won’t be at the annual conference, please feel free to reach out to me by email with your questions and ideas.
In closing, I also wanted to take a moment and thank all the HAPS committee members, board members, and administrative staff who worked on the lab survey project over the last three years. This project started with a question I asked Ron Gerrits in 2013. I was still very new to HAPS and it was my first annual conference. Looking back reminds me how welcoming we are as an organization and how much we accomplish as volunteers in HAPS. If you’re not already on a HAPS committee, review the committee list on the HAPS website and consider joining one of these fantastic teams. The committees meet in person at the annual conference, but you can still get involved even if you’re not headed to Salt Lake City this year. Just reach out to the corresponding committee chair using their contact information on the HAPS website.
