Student-Designed Data-Oriented Class Projects for a Forensic Science Course

• Activity Number: 443
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Elizabeth J. Malloy* and Laurel MacMillan and James E. Girard and Richard Bennett
• Companies: American University and American University and American University and American University
• Keywords: class projects ; statistics education ; inquiry-based learning ; active learning

Abstract

Students in an inquiry-based honors program at American University participated in a four credit course on forensic science and the US justice system. The course included topics on basic forensic techniques for questioned document analysis, latent fingerprint processing and matching, and chemical analyses. We describe four hands-on chemistry and statistics laboratory sessions in which students designed individual or small group studies for addressing student-developed research questions. The studies were implemented as part of student chemistry wet lab sessions where data measurements were taken. A separate statistics laboratory session provided a setting for data management, exploration, and analysis instruction. We discuss modifications to the document and fingerprint studies which would be suitable student projects when a chemistry wet lab is not available.