Collaborative Research: Promoting Career-readiness through Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences

This project aims to serve the national interest by establishing best practices for effectively embedding career-readiness skill development into undergraduate Biology curricula. There is increasing recognition in undergraduate STEM education of the need to help students develop transferable career-readiness skills (CRS). Employers often identify CRS like critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and technology usage as critical and important for meeting national STEM workforce needs. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are pedagogical tools that increase student interest and persistence in STEM fields and provide a promising platform for effectively developing CRS in undergraduate coursework. This project will leverage established CUREs actively implemented by a large network of instructors and students (Squirrel-Net) to assess the use of CUREs as a strategic way to effectively teach, practice, and improve undergraduate students’ CRS. This Level 2 Engaged Student Learning project will create teaching materials providing instructional guidance on how to emphasize CRS, establish opportunities for their practice, explicitly connect their practice to student career goals, and evaluate their improvement within CUREs. Instructors will be recruited, trained, and supported in the use of all materials. Student and instructor assessments will evaluate the effectiveness of embedding CRS into CUREs. Thus, this project will advance the understanding of best practices for promoting CRS development to all undergraduate students and to prepare the future national workforce. This project builds upon the success and momentum of the Squirrel-Net network which already includes five field-based CUREs, more than 500 instructors, and has been used by over 20,000 students. The proposed work is designed to: 1) develop and embed activities promoting CRS in CUREs, 2) recruit, train, and support instructors in implementing and assessing activities and, 3) evaluate the efficacy of CUREs in impacting student gains and perceptions of career-readiness. Guided by Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), the potential of CUREs to impact CRS development will be assessed with student pre- and post-CURE surveys, self-reflections, and focus groups plus validated rubrics, and focus groups for instructors. Concurrent triangulation design will explore relationships among interventions, skill development, and SCCT. The team will use structural equation modeling to investigate SCCT as a framework for guiding career development and informing best undergraduate STEM teaching practices. All materials will be freely shared at the end of the project, including CRS teaching activities, validated survey, reflection, and focus group questions, and assessment tools related to CRS development and CURE implementation. This project offers broad societal benefits by providing meaningful CRS development experiences for thousands of undergraduate students and training and support for hundreds of instructors in open-source, evidence-based educational approaches. 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.