Chaminade University is an undergraduate university with a special mission of serving Native Hawaiians and students from the US-affiliated Pacific Islands. This Kûlia (Hawaiian: to strive) project will offer innovative educational approaches to prepare the next generation of Hawaiian and Pacific Islander scientists to lead the development of practical and policy-based solutions to Pacific regional challenges. These innovative approaches include a focus on "big data" and the curricular infusion of indigenous knowledge to promote a culturally-inclusive learning environment for cutting-edge science.
Kûlia is an inter-institutional effort (The Chaminade University of Honolulu and the University of Hawaii at Hilo) that will leverage domain science, diversity/equity and data science expertise. The project will address the IUSE aims of improving STEM-learning environments, broadening participation, and building a professional STEM workforce for tomorrow. Three specific activities will be undertaken. First, the two semester introductory biology courses required of all science majors at Chaminade will be converted to authentic, semester-long, research classrooms, with the goals of: promoting early engagement in research classrooms and creating a research mindset for students; increasing student persistence in science majors; closing an initial gap in the existing inquiry-based curriculum; and providing a vehicle for crowd-sourcing faculty research projects. Second, authentic, semester-long, culturally-inspired research projects, will be piloted in senior biology courses. These research classrooms will be framed by indigenous Hawaiian traditional knowledge. Third, recognizing that skills in big data manipulation, analytics and visualization are central to success in tomorrow's scientific workplaces, a core set of data lifecycle modules will be embedded throughout the curriculum and tools will be developed for assessment of student competencies in gathering, organizing and analyzing large, complex data sets. Kulia will provide new tools for small undergraduate institutions, especially Minority Serving Institutions, to confront the emerging digital disparity that threatens to exclude their students from access to, and success in, tomorrow's STEM careers. To help assess the effectiveness of this suite of curricular innovations the project will employ several approaches including use of the Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) survey and the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument.
