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Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been shown to improve both persistence and graduation rates for women and students of color (Alquicira et al. 2022). Although these effects are observed broadly across higher education, they are especially pronounced in the context of the STEM fields (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2017). Although community colleges disproportionately enroll students who can most benefit from UREs, structural barriers make UREs rare at community colleges (Hewlett 2018). This change project, based at a mid-sized community college in Washington State, is part of the state’s Consortium for Undergraduate Research and Equity (CURE) and aspires to address the paucity of community college research opportunities in STEM through the design and implementation of a year-long research project for students enrolled in the primary course sequence for biology majors (approximately 50-100 annually). The project’s underlying theory of change is twofold. First, two local community partners and four science faculty use backward design to create a research project that embeds laboratory skills and learning outcomes in a year-long URE. Second, participating faculty replace the entire lab curriculum in the college’s three-course biology sequence with this applied year-long research project. Incorporating applied research into the college’s biology curriculum demystifies and democratizes inquiry-based research for first-generation, underrepresented, and/or academically underprepared students, who also may not have the financial privilege to participate in an unpaid internship that affords them such an experience. Preliminary findings from this change initiative will focus on project goals related to creating equitable access across a range of outcomes including demographic participation rates, the development of professional STEM research skills, and the extent to which UREs enhance a community college student’s sense of belonging among a larger scientific community.
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Successful Model for a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) in Mathematics and STEM during the First Two Years of College
The importance of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) has been increasingly defended and documented in the last decades. As a consequence of its popularity, internships, summer camps and other types of UREs have become more competitive and harder for students to access, and, in the last years, colleges, universities and educative centers have developed an interest in offering their own opportunities in the form of Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). This paper introduces a model for an accessible, low-cost, high-efficiency CURE in Mathematics with the involvement of collateral STEM disciplines like Statistics, Data Science or Business. The model is a work-in-progress that has been offered and tested for two academic years (2021-22 and 2022-23), with the course delivered in the fall and its fruits coming throughout the whole year. This paper presents a justification of the CURE and its design and a description of the methodology used, the challenges surpassed and the results obtained during those first two editions or iterations, including publications, exposure in national conferences and other success data. It emphasizes the key aspects that make the course simple and exportable, so the reader acquires the know-how and can easily instrument the course at their own institution. The CURE was developed at a two-year college as part of a larger NSF-awarded project, and has established connections with four-year institutions, high schools, national and international professional associations, journals and conferences, employers, private investors and government agencies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821351
- PAR ID:
- 10507966
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-0001-7
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 124 to 131
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Laurel, MD, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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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