Forming a Community of Practice to Support Faculty in Implementing Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences

A Review of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences in Chemistry

“…Not represented in Figure are the remaining articles that met the inclusion criteria for the review but did not fit into the categories of describing a CURE or presenting research related to CUREs (7 articles or 10% of included articles). These articles included perspectives on developing and implementing CUREs, − reports drawing upon several vignettes from faculty members who have implemented CUREs, , a commentary suggesting the value of CURE leadership for training future faculty, and one article, authored by undergraduates, which presented the results of the research conducted within a CURE . In the following sections, we first synthesize the articles describing a CURE by providing an overview of the institution types, lengths of CUREs, types of courses (lower- or upper-division and chemistry subdiscipline), research topics, the inclusion of CURE components (discovery, relevance, collaboration, iteration, and science practices), methods for evaluating CUREs (quantitative and qualitative), and insights for adapting CUREs to other settings or adapting CUREs due to COVID; we then synthesize the trends in research related to chemistry CUREs.…”

“…In a similar case, a CURE offered only at a primarily undergraduate institution closely collaborated with a research laboratory at a doctoral university . Collaborations such as these may be promoted by laboratory instructors forming communities of practice with other instructors across institutions to support one another with developing and implementing CUREs …”

“…48 Collaborations such as these may be promoted by laboratory instructors forming communities of practice with other instructors across institutions to support one another with developing and implementing CUREs. 34 Length of CUREs. A majority of the articles describing CUREs reported courses designed to take the entire course, with lengths between 9 and 16 weeks depending on the institution (36 articles, 65% of articles describing CUREs).…”

Factors associated with chemistry faculty members’ cooperative adoption of evidence-based instructional practices: results from a national survey

“…For instance, OrganicERs is a CoP designed to introduce active-learning techniques to organic chemistry faculty members across the United States (Leontyev et al, 2020). Stone et al (2020) also report the formation of a CoP to support chemistry faculty members in implementing course-based undergraduate research experiences, an evidencebased pedagogy for the instructional laboratory, across institutions. Further, the Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC) is a CoP committed to sharing instructional content and evidence-based teaching practices among inorganic chemistry faculty members internationally (Watson et al, 2020).…”

Measuring integrated understanding of undergraduate chemistry research experiences: assessing oral and written research artifacts

“…Most previous studies that assess learning outcomes of science research experiences are limited to a description of the research experience or self-report data; fewer studies validate self-reports with analysis of research products, direct measures of mastery of scientific content or practice, or observations of student activities (Linn et al, 2015;National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, 2017;Krim et al, 2019;Lin et al, 2019). Scholars such as Pagano et al (2018) and Stone et al (2020) have commented on the limited number of studies dedicated to examining the impacts of CUREs in chemistry, when compared to the life sciences. Thus, there is a need for additional assessment tools that can be applied to undergraduate research experiences in chemistry, both inside and outside of the classroom.…”