Abstract
Leaders of national reform efforts have been urging institutions to teach science as it is performed in the workplace, providing students with learning experiences that reflect the practices of professionals. Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) are practices that address this charge; yet, UREs are often limited to a small percentage of students, and often exclude students with limited time and resources. Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) represent opportunities for research that are built into a department’s course curricula, thus eliminating the barriers associated with faculty-mentored UREs. CUREs are typically created with specific curricular design elements to ensure the CURE represents an authentic research experience. Our institution responded to research experience inequities with the Sustainable Interdisciplinary Research to Inspire Undergraduate Success (SIRIUS) Project, a multi-disciplinary program to design CUREs and integrate them across the curricula of the Department of Biological Sciences. All students participating in the SIRIUS project conduct research related to human impacts on the American River, which runs through campus and the river is listed as impaired. All biology majors take multiple SIRIUS courses during their degree programs, thus receiving multiple opportunities to perform research and contribute to the generation of novel data. The question is, do students perceive the work they are performing in the classroom as authentic research? Guided by the authenticity literature and the CURE Framework, we explore this question through the perceptions of students in introductory, intermediate, and advanced SIRIUS courses.
The courses in this study span the Department of Biological Science’s curricula at California State University, Sacramento and contribute to the requirements or electives of all degree concentrations offered by the department. In total, 1,252 students were surveyed from Fall 2015 – Spring 2019. We used two survey instruments in this cross-sectional, mixed-methods study: 1) the Laboratory Course Assessment Survey (LCAS, quantitative) and 2) an open-ended question about authenticity of science (qualitative) to compare students’ perceptions of science authenticity in their introductory, intermediate, and advanced SIRIUS CUREs. We hypothesize that students in introductory, intermediate, and advanced CUREs will recognize different research-based activities and perceive the authenticity of their research experiences differently.
The LCAS includes 17 Likert-like items that measure students’ perceptions of participation in laboratory course curricula in three areas: Collaboration, Discovery and Relevance, and Iteration. The Authenticity Question asked students, “Did you feel like you were doing ‘real science’ in your lab course? Why or Why not?” The LCAS and Authenticity Question were administered as part of the same end-of-semester survey.
Students at all levels of CURE participation percieved participation in all three LCAS contructs, but Kruskal-Wallis test results indicated differences in participation between levels. Advanced students reported participating in activities related to Collaboration, Discovery/Relevance, and Iteration significanlty more than introductory and intermediate students. Introductory and intermediate students perceived participation in similar degrees regarding activities related to Collaboration and Discovery/Relevance; however, introductory students reported significantly more agreement than intermediate students that they participated in iterative activities.
Students across all levels combined responded positively to the Authenticity Question. The percentage of positive responses increased as levels increased, with advanced students indicating their experience was authentic science 98.0% of the time (n=100). We used a descriptive coding method to analyze student responses to the ‘why’ portion of the Authenticity Question. Students across all levels described the CURE curricular elements, defined by experts as elements of authentic science, as the reasons why their laboratory experiences were viewed as “real science”; however, advanced students mentioned all CURE curricular elements more frequently than introductory and intermediate students. Introductory and intermediate students cited the CURE curricular elements at similar frequencies to each other. The use of Scientific Practices (e.g., using the scientific method, experimental tools, and protocols) was the most frequently cited reason students perceived their CUREs as ‘real science.’ Other reasons CUREs were viewed as authentic included students gaining important skills for future courses and careers, opportunities for independent decision making, and the possibility of failure during their experiment. The most frequently cited reason students perceived their lab work to be inauthentic was the feeling that their experience was limited in some way (e.g., lacked time, or lacked opportunities for decision making).
In conclusion, our study indicates that students in SIRIUS CUREs recognize the authenticity of their laboratory experiences. It also indicates that students across levels engage in activities related to authentic science to different degrees. The differences in the CURE curricula likely influence students’ perceptions about the scientific authenticity. This work highlights the importance of students’ progression in a scaffolded research curriculum designed to support their research skills development and contributes to the growing literature on CUREs with a focus on an important population of students from an institution with multiple minority serving designations (Minority Serving Institution, Asian American, Native American, Pacific Islander, Serving Institution, Hispanic Serving Institution).