Expanding Upon Successes of Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences: Strategic Analysis of Student and Instructor Outcomes for Larger Scale Implementation

This project aims to serve the national interest by investigating how a successful biology course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), known as the SEA-PHAGES program, helps undergraduate students engage and persist in STEM fields. Many students leave STEM majors after perceiving a lack of institutional support or struggling to stay engaged in passive lectures. Significantly, in SEA-PHAGES courses, on the other hand, students become actively involved in their learning by studying and discovering viruses in their local environment. Previous research has shown that student participation in these interactive and discovery-based courses increases their motivation and likelihood of persisting in STEM. The importance of this project is that it intends to explore the pedagogical practices used by instructors who teach successful SEA-PHAGES courses and determine the strategies that both students and instructors feel are important for student learning. The goal of this Level 1 Engaged Student Learning project is to identify those CURE activities that instructors across the United States can use to gain students' trust, increase their buy-in to a science course, and encourage them to remain in STEM. While learning gains from student participation in course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are well-known, the mechanisms within CUREs that lead to these desired outcomes are unclear. This project addresses this gap by investigating the pedagogical practices and student process variables that contribute to positive outcomes in the HHMI SEA-PHAGES CURE courses. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, this project intends to advance understanding of the elements of CURES that make them effective science education activities. To do so, the project team intends to qualitatively assess instructor and program administrator perspectives on impactful pedagogical practices, compare them with the perspectives of SEA-PHAGES students, and finally align them with pathway models that visually represent the SEA-PHAGES program. The plan is for these efforts to be used to develop an implementation and dissemination plan for adapting effective teaching practices across a broader range of undergraduate STEM classrooms. The findings of this work can then be leveraged to improve professional development programs, CURE curriculum development efforts, and national reform of undergraduate STEM education to improve student outcomes. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.