https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0546-8046
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ABSTRACT
Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been described as a mechanism to allow more undergraduates to engage in research experiences. To understand whether CUREs are viable to scale-up undergraduate access to research experiences, it is essential to carefully evaluate whether CUREs promote comparable self-reported outcomes for students and are less resource intensive than undergraduate research internships. In comparing student outcomes from four distinct CUREs to outcomes from students engaged in a summer research programme in the biology department at one institution, we found that students in both experiences self-report comparable gains on all items studied using the Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment tool. CURE students report similar levels of satisfaction with aspects of research experiences, such as amount of time spent conducting research and working with a mentor, compared with students engaged in the summer research programme. The CUREs studied here are less resource intensive than the summer research programme, and still led to comparable self-reported outcomes. These courses increased the number of biology undergraduates able to engage in research experiences, suggesting that CUREs are a viable option to expand access to research experiences that promote expected learning outcomes in a more efficient way.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Department of Biology for support in instituting these CUREs; Dr. Donna Murasko for her overall support of the development of a CURE curriculum when she served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Dr. Suzanne Rocheleau for her support of this research as the former Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, Ms. Leanne Sweppenheiser for providing enrollment data; Brian Thiel, Ritu Dalia, the teaching assistants and lab prep staff for the Discovering Antibiotics and Drosophila Neural Research courses; the STAR mentors for their support of the summer research programme; the Offices of the President and the Provost at Drexel for their support of the STAR Scholars Program; and Eric Brewe, John DiNardo, and Tod Duncan for providing helpful comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by NSF under grant numbers IOS 1256114 and 1856439, Howard Hughes Medical Institute under grant number 52008094 and additional curricular support for the SEA-PHAGES programme, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the Drexel Areas of Research Excellence (DARE) Award for Experiential Learning through the Cooperative Education Lifecycle (ExCEL), the College of Arts and Sciences Innovative Teaching Award, and start-up funds from Drexel University. This manuscript is based on work done in part by Daniel R. Marenda while serving at the U.S. National Science Foundation. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation or the United States Government. The authors have no other financial, commercial, legal, or professional conflicts of interest.
Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest
The authors have no financial, commercial, or legal conflicts of interest. Drs Marenda, Anandan, Gurney, Kabnick, Little, Smith and Stanford were involved in developing and/or teaching the CUREs described. This manuscript is based on work done in part by Daniel R. Marenda while serving at the U.S. National Science Foundation. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation or the United States Government.