At the University of East Anglia (UEA) we pride ourselves in our strong commitment to research led teaching. In the School of Biological Sciences this is ultimately borne out in the final year (year 3/4) research project where all our undergraduates have the opportunity to carry out their own piece of novel research. At UEA these projects have traditionally taken the format of the student spending eight weeks (10-15 hours per week) on the data collection aspect in the laboratory or in the field prior to writing a report and giving a talk. Over the last few years a number of different pressures on traditional project provision have built up from both students' and supervisors' perspectives as they have at other universities (Hollingsworth et al. 2004; Ryder 2004). From the students' perspective a small but significant proportion of students each year do not want a practical-based project due to particular career aspirations or the knowledge that hands-on research is not for them. From the supervisors' point of view growing numbers of students have imposed increasing strains on the provision and supervision of the projects. These combined pressures led us to seek an alternative to the time and resource-consuming laboratory or field-based research project but which maintained a strong research led approach to teaching. This resulted in the development of a new Year 3 module titled 'Analyses in Biology'.
