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Campus shutdowns during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic posed unique challenges to faculty and students engaged in laboratory courses. Formerly hands-on experiments had to be quickly pivoted to emergency remote learning. While some resources existed prior to this period, many currently available online modules and/or simulations focus on a single technique. The Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab (BASIL) curriculum has, for several years, provided a robust, linked, holistic inquiry experience that allows students to make connections between multiple techniques, both computational in nature as well as wet-lab based. As a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), this flexible, module-based curriculum allows students to generate original hypotheses based on analysis of proteins of unknown function. We have taught this curriculum as the upper-level laboratory course on our campuses and were obliged to transition to remote instruction at various points in the course sequence. We report on the experiences of faculty and students over the transition period in this course. Additionally, we report as a case study results of one of our campus’ ongoing discipline-based education research (DBER) on the BASIL curriculum prior to and during remote delivery.
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Authentic Scientific Research through an Undergraduate Ecology Course
Undergraduate science students who volunteer within a research laboratory group, or participate in funded research opportunities, in general are those who have the opportunity to engage in authentic research. In this article, we report the findings from two different iterations of a semester-long collaboration between a biology faculty member and a science education faculty member at a major research institution in the Southeastern United States. Specifically, the faculty members designed an ecology laboratory course for upper-level undergraduate students (primarily biology majors) where they would engage in an original and highly authentic ecological research project. The goal of this course was to have students explicitly learn about the nature of science (NOS), and authentic scientific practices such as inquiry and experimentation in the context of their own research. In the second year of the course, the global COVID-19 pandemic forced us to modify our approach to accomplish the same goals, but now in a remote and online format. Using questionnaires, concept inventories, and semi-structured interviews, the impact of the course on students’ understandings of NOS, inquiry, and experimentation, in addition to their perspectives on the experience within the course compared to prior laboratory coursework, was investigated. We found that students showed modest gains in each of the aforementioned desirable outcomes. These gains were generally comparable in both face-to-face and remote course settings. Additionally, students shared with us their preference for authentic laboratory work as compared with the typical laboratory work with its given research question and step-by-step instructions. Our research demonstrates what is possible in both face-to-face and remote undergraduate laboratory courses in biology and the positive impact that was observed in our students. We hope it serves as a model for other scientists and science educators as they collaborate to design authentic research-based coursework for undergraduate biology students.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1748945
- PAR ID:
- 10505635
- Publisher / Repository:
- National Association of Biology Teachers
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The American Biology Teacher
- Volume:
- 85
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0002-7685
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 336 to 342
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Andrews, Tessa C. (Ed.)Limited access to undergraduate research experiences for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students has led to creation of classroom-based opportunities for students to participate in authentic science. Revising laboratory courses to engage students in the practices of science has been shown to have many benefits for students. However, the instructor’s role in successful implementation of authentic-inquiry curricula requires further investigation. Previous work has demonstrated that navigating an instructional role within the open-ended format of an inquiry curriculum is challenging for instructors. Little is known about effective strategies for supporting students in authentic scientific practices. To address this challenge, we investigated instructors with prior experience teaching Authentic Inquiry through Modeling in Biology (AIM-Bio) in order to reveal strategies that are likely to help students succeed in this context. We took a unique approach that uncovered how instructors supported students and how they intended to support students in the scientific practices of modeling and experimental design. Analysis included in vivo recordings of instructor–student interactions paired with instructor interviews over the course of a semester. Findings detail the ways in which instructors flexibly responded to students through their in-the-moment actions. Additionally, the instructor intentions provided crucial explanatory power to explain the rationale behind teaching choices made.more » « less
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Synopsis Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide a scalable model for engaging students in authentic scientific inquiry, bridging core biological concepts with real-world environmental applications. We introduce a new CURE lab tailored for introductory biology students at the undergraduate level, utilizing duckweed as a model organism to investigate ecological interactions and environmental management. Our paper presents a curriculum that engages students in hands-on research with a focus on duckweed’s role in ecosystem dynamics, pollutant remediation, and its potential as a bioresource, along with scientific results from student projects that serve as tangible examples of the curriculum’s outcomes. Through experimentation, students explore how duckweed can be applied to address real-world environmental challenges, utilizing advanced laboratory techniques and data analysis tools. Successfully implemented with 192 students across three semesters at our institutions, this CURE lab has produced reliable duckweed growth data with high reproducibility. This curriculum addresses the gap between traditional laboratory exercises and authentic research experiences through introducing opportunities to conduct reproducible experiments, analyze real data, and communicate scientific findings in meaningful contexts.more » « less
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Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are an effective way to integrate research into an undergraduate science curriculum and extend research experiences to a large, diverse group of early-career students. We developed a biology CURE at the University of Miami (UM) called the UM Authentic Research Laboratories (UMARL), in which groups of first-year students investigated novel questions and conducted projects of their own design related to the research themes of the faculty instructors. Herein, we describe the implementation and student outcomes of this long-running CURE. Using a national survey of student learning through research experiences in courses, we found that UMARL led to high student self-reported learning gains in research skills such as data analysis and science communication, as well as personal development skills such as self-confidence and self-efficacy. Our analysis of academic outcomes revealed that the odds of students who took UMARL engaging in individual research, graduating with a degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) within 4 years, and graduating with honors were 1.5–1.7 times greater than the odds for a matched group of students from UM’s traditional biology labs. The authenticity of UMARL may have fostered students’ confidence that they can do real research, reinforcing their persistence in STEM.more » « less
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Most undergraduates studying biochemistry and molecular biology get their broadest exposure to wet-lab techniques in protein and nucleic acid chemistry (and, increasingly, computer/visualization) in their upper-level laboratory courses. These tend to be juniors and seniors with well-defined career goals. Some of these students will have already have a research background in a traditional one-to-one (or one-to-few) research mentoring setting, for example a summer research program. This approach has proved effective at increasing student learning and persistence in the sciences. At the same time, extended full-time PI-directed research is limited in the number of students served, and can even present a barrier. To broaden the impact of teaching through research, many practitioners have adopted a CURE, or Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience, approach.This presentation reports on “BASIL” (Biochemical Authentic Scientific Inquiry Laboratory), a team of faculty who have worked to bring computational and wet-lab protein science to the biochemistry teaching lab. Together, we have developed a protein biochemistry CURE to determine enzymatic function of proteins of unknown activity. This work leverages the results of the Protein Structure Initiative, a fifteen-year NIH-funded effort which concluded in 2015 with the publication and distribution of more than 5000 previously uncharacterized proteins. The great majority of these are “orphans,” with high quality structures and pre-cloned expression plasmids available, but no research on their enzymatic function or role in native organisms. The BASIL consortium of undergraduate biochemistry faculty and students seeks to identify functional properties of a subset of these uncharacterized proteins, seeking to unify structure and function relationships. Currently, implementable modules are available for faculty who wish to adopt them, and expected student results will be presented.Support or Funding InformationSupported by NSF IUSE 1709278This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2023.85.6.336
