Curriculum of the Lecture Series - Pitfalls and Solutions: "Good Experimental Design"

The Lecture Series: Pitfalls and Solutions "Good Experimental Design" has been organized regularly since 2017. Since the topics of the lectures are also relevant and interesting for new postdoctoral researchers and Clinician Scientists at the faculty, the lectures will be repeated at regular intervals in the future. For this purpose, a 3-year curriculum of the lecture series has been developed. When selecting the lectures included in the curriculum, special attention was paid to ensure that all phases of the research cycle are covered: identification of research topics, formulation of research hypotheses, design of a research project, conducting experiments/ data collection, analysis of results, interpretation of results and presentation of the research data (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Research cycle adapted from S. Reisas published in Einfach gute Lehre – Der Lehre-Blog der CAU Kiel: Forschungsbasiertes Lernen im Praktikum from July, 12th, 2019 (https://www.einfachgutelehre.uni-kiel.de/allgemein/forschungsbasiertes-lernen-im-praktikum/) based on Wildt, J.: Forschendes Lernen: Lernen im „Format“ der Forschung in Journal Hochschuldidaktik, 2009.

Based on these considerations, the lectures offered in the curriculum were divided into three categories: Lectures on general topics, which are repeated every three years (green), lectures on basic research methods, which are also offered every three years (dark blue), and open slots for lectures for current research methods in preclinical and clinical research (light blue).

Each year of the curriculum, up to six lectures are planned. The last start of the curriculum was in fall 2022.