Search for: All records

As Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) continue to expand across the United States, there is an even greater need for faculty at HSIs to engage with the construct of servingness to advance Latinx student success. Yet, there is very little research that points to professional development for faculty to understand what servingness means and how to implement it into faculty roles of research, teaching, and service. To address this gap, this paper provides a model for faculty professional development around and with servingness. Following, this paper centers the voces of six faculty from diverse fields and disciplines who in their first year at an HSI participated in a professional development series focused on servingness, and who, then explicitly connected their research and teaching with servingness. As such, this paper provides practical steps to design professional development for faculty around servingness. It also highlights the significance of professional development for faculty implementation of servingness in research and teaching. 

Teaching assistants (TA) have increasingly been tasked with facilitating course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). Yet, there is little discussion in the literature regarding the need for or approaches to providing professional development (PD) for this population. This essay is a “call to action” for promoting intentional CURE TA PD. 

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), which often engage students as early as freshman year, have become increasingly common in biology curricula. While many studies have highlighted the benefits of CUREs, little attention has been paid to responsible and ethical conduct of research (RECR) education in such contexts. Given this observation, we adopted a mixed methods approach to explore the extent to which RECR education is being implemented and assessed in biological sciences CUREs nationwide. Survey and semistructured interview data show a general awareness of the importance of incorporating RECR education into CUREs, with all respondents addressing at least one RECR topic in their courses. However, integration of RECR education within the CURE environment primarily focuses on the application of RECR during research practice, often takes the form of corrective measures, and appears to be rarely assessed. Participants reported lack of time and materials as the main barriers to purposeful inclusion of RECR education within their courses. These results underscore a need for the CURE community to develop resources and effective models to integrate RECR education into biology CUREs. 

Advancement of the scientific enterprise relies on individuals conducting research in an ethical and responsible manner. Educating emergent scholars in the principles of ethics/responsible conduct of research (E/RCR) is therefore critical to ensuring such advancement. The recent impetus to include authentic research opportunities as part of the undergraduate curriculum, via course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), has been shown to increase cognitive and noncognitive student outcomes. Because of these important benefits, CUREs are becoming more common and often constitute the first research experience for many students. However, despite the importance of E/RCR in the research process, we know of few efforts to incorporate E/RCR education into CUREs. The Ethics Network for Course-based Opportunities in Undergraduate Research (ENCOUR) was created to address this concern and promote the integration of E/RCR within CUREs in the biological sciences and related disciplines. During the inaugural ENCOUR meeting, a four-pronged approach was used to develop guidelines for the effective integration of E/RCR in CUREs. This approach included: 1) defining appropriate student learning objectives; 2) identifying relevant curriculum; 3) identifying relevant assessments; and 4) defining key aspects of professional development for CURE facilitators. Meeting outcomes, including the aforementioned E/RCR guidelines, are described herein.