CURES AND INCREASING PARTICIPATION IN STEM

With increasingly voluble calls from academic and government stakeholders to improve educational and professional outcomes for undergraduates, STEM faculty are continuously inventing new ways to solve old problems such as student attrition and declining graduate rates. Specifically, there have been many appeals to increase the number of undergraduate research experiences for students. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CURES) have been suggested as a vehicle to move the needle in terms of producing sustainable improvements in higher education. CURES provide opportunities for STEM undergraduates enrolled in a particular course to engage in faculty-mentored, hypothesis-driven research activities. In apprenticeship-style research experiences only a few students receive training in the art of conducting and communicating research findings, while a well-structured CURES affords the opportunity for a large number of students to participate in real-world research training. Each course-based research endeavor consists of five components: research activities, discovery, relevance, collaboration, and iteration. The five components of CURES distinguish it from other active learning approaches and represent a major improvement from recipe-structured laboratories that dominate many academic environments. Experimental findings from empirical investigations indicate that CURES produce an upsurge in retention, student engagement, student satisfaction, and comprehension of science process skills.