The Future of Education

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) integrate scientific research into the undergraduate curriculum. In CUREs, students work on broadly relevant and novel research in the context of a lab course. In this study, we explore how working with broadly relevant and novel data influence students. We compared students enrolled in a cookbook version (n =37) and students enrolled in a CURE version (n = 32) of a course focused on characterizing the immune system of mice. The only difference between the two courses were the mice used: in the cookbook course, students worked with wildtype mice and in the CURE, students worked with transgenic mice with an immune system not yet characterized. We explored the impact of working with broadly relevant and novel data on students’ project ownership.  Students in the cookbook lab and the CURE took the Project Ownership survey at the end of their respective course.  The Project Ownership Survey was not valid when used with these students and an exploratory factor analysis identified that the original scale was comprised of three different factors: scientific experience, novelty and broad relevance, and personal enjoyment.  We found that students in the CURE reported the same amount of personal enjoyment and scientific experience and only reported experiencing more novelty and broad relevance than students in the cookbook lab course.  Additionally, we interviewed 24 students enrolled in the CURE about how they were affected by working with broadly relevant and novel data.  Students reported that the learned to think more like a scientist by working with real data because they thought more critically about data analysis and interpretation than they would have if they were working on a research problem where the outcome was already known.  This study addresses the call to take a more reductionist approach to identify critical elements of undergraduate research experiences that lead to positive student outcomes.

Keywords: Course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE); laboratory experience; project ownership; critical thinking; novel data;