Recent national reports call for undergraduate laboratory courses to be transformed so that all students have research experiences. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have proven to be a successful educational innovation for enabling more students to do research. The biological context for this education research project is a CURE that is based on the gut bacterial microbiome of the bean beetle, Callosobruchus maculatus. College and university faculty from a range of institutions and geographic locations will attend workshops as a part of this project to learn how to work with bean beetles, study their microbiome, evaluate microbial community data, and implement bean beetle microbiome CUREs in their courses. Working with bean beetles will allow student researchers to readily manipulate factors that might affect gut bacteria in ways that would not be possible with vertebrates or other insect model systems. Students will have the freedom to design their own experiments and to develop their own research questions, as practicing scientists do. The project is designed to examine the importance of student autonomy (i.e. choosing their own research questions) in the context of course-based research classes, and to guide science educators as they change the way in which science is learned and taught. This project has the potential to benefit students at a range of institutions including minority serving and two-year colleges by increasing the retention of students in science and fostering interest in pursuing STEM careers or graduate school.
The overall goal of this project is to determine the importance of student autonomy in a discovery CURE across diverse institutions. This goal will be achieved by disseminating, implementing, and assessing a data-intensive bean beetle microbiome CURE that will simultaneously advance our understanding of insect host-microbe interactions. The first objective is to examine the importance of student autonomy in a discovery CURE. Student outcomes will be assessed using a mixed methods approach with surveys, structured interviews, and focus groups. The second objective is to foster research on insect host-microbe interactions using experimental approaches with the bean beetle model system. The third and fourth goals are to develop faculty expertise with hands-on workshops in research protocols for examining microbial communities in bean beetles, and in data science for bioinformatics and microbial community analyses. The fifth objective is to foster the implementation of data-intensive course-based research at diverse institutions. Faculty from the hands-on workshops will implement a bean beetle microbiome CURE in two different semesters. The project is designed to increase the number of minority and two-year college students who participate in CUREs, stay engaged in science, and pursue graduate degrees in STEM disciplines.
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.
