A Guide to Course-based Undergraduate Research by Erin Dolan; Gabriela Weaver - First Edition, 2021 from Macmillan Student Store

A Guide to Course-based Undergraduate Research

First  Edition©2021  Erin Dolan; Gabriela Weaver

ISBN:9781319394981

ISBN:9781319367183

About

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) are being championed by high profile organizations for their potential to engage undergraduates in research at scale. CUREs are learning experiences in which whole classes of students address a research question or problem with unknown outcomes or solutions that are of interest to the scientific community. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the benefits of CUREs for student learning, development, and persistence in the natural sciences.

This guide will walk you through designing and implementing a course-based undergraduate research experience.

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Table of Contents

1. Why CUREs?
2. What is a CURE? Features and Structures
3. Developing a CURE
4. Implementing a Course That Involves a CURE
5. Institutionalization and Scale-Up
6. The Scholarship of CUREs

Erin Dolan

Erin Dolan is a professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and a Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Innovative Science Education at the University of Georgia (http://research.franklin.uga.edu/erindolan/). As a graduate student in Neuroscience at University of California San Francisco, she volunteered extensively in K-12 schools, which prompted her to pursue a career in biology education. For several years, she led professional development programs on science education for high school teachers and higher education faculty. She also established collaborations between high school teachers and plant scientists to guide high school students in designing and conducting experiments to yield novel insights about gene function in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. She then transitioned to working in undergraduate biology education. She currently teach introductory biology and biochemistry, and her research group studies student development in science research environments, including scalable ways of engaging students in science research and mentoring of undergraduate researchers in the life sciences. She has designed and led a wide range of professional development on active learning and mentoring, including multi-day, intensive sessions for faculty to develop their own CUREs. I she has had the privilege of leading CUREnet (https://serc.carleton.edu/curenet), a network of people and programs integrating research experiences into undergraduate courses. She also just completed a decade as Editor-in-Chief of the biology education journal, CBE – Life Sciences Education (http://www.lifescied.org/).

Gabriela Weaver

Gabriela Weaver serves as Special Assistant to the Provost for Educational Initiatives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously, her role was Vice Provost for Faculty Development, and director of the Institute for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development (TEFD). Prior to coming to UMass, she served as professor of chemistry and science education and the Jerry and Rosie Semler Director of the Discovery Learning Research Center at Purdue University. In 2019, she was awarded a Fellowship with the American Council of Education which she carried out at Boston University. In 2012, she was elected as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for distinguished contributions to transforming science education at the undergraduate level. She has been a co-author on two chemistry textbooks, and the 2015 book Transforming Institutions: Undergraduate STEM Education for the 21st Century, as well as author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. From 2004-2012, she served as director of the NSF-funded multi-institutional CASPiE project (Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education) dedicated to involving first- and second-year undergraduate students in research experiences. She was a member of the convening committee for the NASEM workshop on Integrating Discovery-Based Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum and a co-author on the resulting report by the same name (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015). Her research interests include educational practices that increase student success and the institutionalization of such practices through the transformation of cultures and processes in higher education. She earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder.