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Title: The Sphagnome Project: enabling ecological and evolutionary insights through a genus-level sequencing project
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  1. Boone, E. ; Thuecks, S. (Ed.)
    Recent calls for increased inclusion in & access to authentic course-based research have been building on the momentum of support for Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). However, these courses can be very challenging to implement at scale or with low resources. To equitably provide these critical science process skills to the largest possible cohort of students, we have developed a new student research project within our first-year biology lab. Our student team research project is integrated throughout the semester, building authentic science process skills from start to finish. Students start from a research idea, develop a multi-site experimental design, do hands-on data collection at home, analyze quantitative data, and present their findings in a conference-style format. We have also embedded structured time for building collaborative skills. This novel change to our lab curriculum runs online, hybrid or face-to-face; it has no lab budget costs; and it has been well-received in multiple offerings of our course of ~200-600 students. It also has allowed us to improve our assessments: we evaluate writing (graphical abstracts) and/or oral presentation skills. Further, our lab exam can now be more cognitively challenging because our new curriculum better prepares students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize. This article demonstrates that we can reduce barriers to doing authentic research, at scale in introductory courses; and we include here all materials needed to adapt this project to your own context. 
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  2. null (Ed.)
    To evaluate the impact of a multidisciplinary, project-based course in introductory statistics, this exploratory study examined learning experiences, feelings of confidence, and interest in future experiences with data for undergraduate students in Ghana, West Africa. Students completed a one-semester, introductory statistics course utilizing the Passion-Driven Statistics curriculum. Results showed more than half of the students put more effort into the course and found the material more challenging compared to other courses, while nearly three-quarters reported interest in one or more follow-up courses. Importantly, students also reported increased confidence in a variety of applied statistical skills. These findings demonstrate the positive impact of a multidisciplinary, project-based curriculum on undergraduate students in Ghana, West Africa and demonstrate the potential for its global portability. 
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  3. Over the course of several semesters, two different project-based learning approaches were used in two undergraduate engineering courses–a 100-level introductory course that covered a general education requirement on information literacy and a 300-level fluid mechanics course. One project (treatment) was an interdisciplinary service-learning project, implemented with undergraduate engineering and education students who collaborated to develop and deliver engineering lessons to fourth and fifth-grade students in a field trip model. The other projects (comparison) involved a team-based design project contained within each class. In the 100-level course, students selected their project based on personal interests and followed the engineering design process to develop, test, and redesign a prototype. In the fluid mechanics class, students designed a pumped pipeline system for a hypothetical plant. This study aimed to determine whether participating in the interdisciplinary project affected students’ evaluation of their own and their teammates’ teamwork effectiveness skills, measured using the Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME). The five dimensions of CATME measured in this study are (1) contribution to the team’s work, (2) interacting with teammates, (3) keeping the team on track, (4) expecting quality, and (5) having relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). The quantitative data from CATME were analyzed using ANCOVA. Furthermore, since data were collected over three semesters and coincided with the pre, during, and post-phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was possible to examine the effects of the evolving classroom constraints over the course of the pandemic on the teamwork effectiveness skills of both the treatment and comparison classes. 
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