Recent research indicates that engaging students in research projects early in their careers helps them to understand how science is practiced, improves their understanding of basic science concepts and increases their potential to complete a degree in science and will help them to better understand how science affects their daily lives. This EAGER pilot project will establish a consortium of scientists and educators (from the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) and three Hispanic serving community colleges Cuyamaca, Palomar and Mount San Jacinto colleges) that will engage 3000 students per year in original research, using DNA barcoding to investigate the distribution of insects within their local areas; a project that will serve both science and the students well. Hispanic students in particular have very high intentions to major in STEM but very low retention rates (www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd). They may have the most to gain from an authentic research experience at the start of their academic careers.
The science involved is also important as the project will help chronicle the biodiversity of the local area, something that is just beginning to be known. For example, despite 250 years of modern taxonomy scientists estimate that 70% of all insect species have never been named, described, or documented. Given the importance of insects to the environment in which we live there is a pressing need to catalogue the distribution of insects across wide areas of the earth. With the advent of modern methods of identifying species, it has become increasingly easy to engage undergraduate students in this process. The San Diego Biodiversity Project seeks to address this knowledge gap while engaging undergraduate students across the region in cutting-edge, original, collaborative research.
It is an expansion of a project UCSD established in 2012 (NSF TUES #1140640). Students will collect and barcode invertebrates from their campus environs, learning the basics of ecological field methods, DNA extraction and amplification, sequencing, and bioinformatics while helping to create a species inventory for their campus. They will upload their data to the Barcode of Life Database, contributing to the international effort to document all species. In the UCSD pilot, about half of the species that students collected were new to the database. The project will, in addition to revising an existing database portal to accommodate college-level use and to emphasize the scientific contributions the students are making, provide: staff and equipment to jump-start the lab work at each two-year school, workshops for joint curriculum development, assessment, and IRB proposal development, and an assessment consultant. UCSD is providing staff expertise for curriculum development, hosting a student research symposium, and summer orientations for potential transfer students. The project is designed to establish long-term collaborations among faculty across campuses and facilitate community college student transfers to research universities.
All of the participant schools will assess the project to determine if it is contributing to the learning outcomes specific to each course. They will also develop a research plan to better understand how underrepresented minorities are affected by course-based research in terms of student confidence in science, retention in STEM, and/or interest in pursuing science at a research-oriented university.
This project is funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education in support of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/)
