Optimizing Undergraduate Research Opportunities via YUREs, SUREs & CUREs

Course based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) have been shown to be highly effective in terms of student achievement and persistence and offer the opportunity to allow every student in a program to experience first hand the scientific process as an integral part of their education. Furthermore they are cost effective ($$ and faculty time) and don’t require students to commit to time outside their usual academic schedule (often a barrier to under-represented students).

Faculty joining OUR Community will become part of a growing community of experienced teachers experienced in involving undergraduates in research via academic year mentored research (YUREs) summer undergraduate research experiences (SUREs) and Course based Undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), exchanging experiences and project areas, lowering the “activation energy” to start and sustain inclusive and effective undergraduate research experiences into their teaching. By participating faculty will also contribute to pedagogical research on how to enhance such teaching and its impact.

OUR community is a national, faculty driven community focusing on the incorporation of YUREs, SUREs & CUREs into Molecular Life Science (Biology, Chemistry and Interdisciplinary life science)  laboratory courses and curricula as a student centric teaching approach to foster greater scientific literacy and foundational content knowledge

The community involves students and faculty from a diverse range of institutions and offers a mutually supportive environment for both students and faculty engaged in CURE activities with resources and opportunities for collaboration and presentation.

All Undergraduate Research Activities implemented by OUR Community contain the same elements: Relevance, Scientific Background, Hypothesis Development, Proposal, Experiments/Teamwork to test hypothesis, Reproducibility, Data Analysis and Conclusions, Presentation, and peer review, but differ in the extent of each between part semester mCUREs and full semester cCUREs

Why?

Creating an infrastructure for a sustainable (beyond the life of the grant) national network of faculty implementing CUREs in  courses from First Year to Capstone in chemistry, biology and at the interface between the disciplines. The CUREs, at whatever level will share the eight common elements of a CURE: i) Relevance, ii) Scientific Background, iii) Hypothesis Development, iv) Proposal, v)Experiments, Teamwork, Collaboration, vi) Reproducibility, vii) Data Analysis & Drawing Evidence Based Conclusion and viii) Presentation. Creating such a network will 1) enhance participation of a large, diverse population of students in authentic research activities, and with a focus on both STEM majors and Non-STEM majors improve both the pipeline into STEM related careers and general STEM literacy, and 2) create a resource to facilitate pedagogical research into effective components of CUREs as well as barriers to faculty implementation of CUREs in their classes.

Overall, OUR Network will:

1) enhance participation of a large, diverse population of students in authentic research activities, and with a focus on both STEM majors and Non-STEM majors improve both the pipeline into STEM related careers and general STEM literacy.

2) create a resource to facilitate pedagogical research into effective components of CUREs as well as barriers to faculty implementation of CUREs in their classes. This resource will have the advantages of both scale and diversity and be uniquely positioned to address pedagogical questions relevant to both effective components of CUREs and their impact

Check out our CURENet Link

 Go to The OUR CUREs Community Facebook page