Project Summary Laboratory safety is an essential component of biomedical research and the training of undergraduate and graduate students. Safety training should ideally occur both prior to entry into a laboratory and continuously throughout laboratory training. Understanding the importance of a culture of safety is an essential life lesson for those who plan to make biomedical research their career. In the first aim we will develop six state-of-the-art and culturally inclusive safety videos in collaboration with our Safety and Risk Management office and Academic Media Laboratory to augment and expand current safety training including addressing the importance of a culture of safety. Training modules using video and animation will be created to provide engaging learning specifically for undergraduate and graduate students in mind. We will use best practices to create effective videos and pay particular attention to cognitive load, student engagement and active learning. We then aim to evaluate the process and outcomes of our videos with creators and students using focus group interviews and the Kirkpatrick Four-Level (reaction, learning, behavior, and results) Training Evaluation Model. The evaluation will be used to assess learning effectiveness regarding the trainees’ knowledge, skills and behavior as well as the process of creating the videos. Our last aim will be to disseminate this resource as wide as possible. It will be a valuable resource not only for our own institution but will be shared with local Historically Black Colleges and Universities partner schools and distributed nationally through the Safety Training Consortium. These laboratory safety training videos will help to train the next generation of diverse biomedical researchers.

Project Narrative To produce the next generation of diverse biomedical researchers, laboratory safety training is an important component. To enhance current laboratory safety training for students, we propose to create six new, state-of-the-art and culturally inclusive safety videos, assess how effective they are and make them widely available to the scientific community.