This book highlights the exciting work of two-year colleges to prepare students for their future careers through engagement in undergraduate research. It emerged from work in five community college systems thanks to two National Science Foundation grants the Council for Undergraduate Research received to support community colleges' efforts to…

This chapter recounts the story of how I came to design a Research Apprenticeship Course at UCLA--what we call the RAC. I lay out the origin story of the RAC dating back to early collaborations with Arturo Madrid of the Tomas Rivera Policy Research Center and the Ford Foundation Family of Fellows in the mid to late 1980s. These collaborations…

Drawing on a multiyear local research project on the affordable housing crisis, this article outlines a pedagogical approach we call Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research, or CISER. The CISER model brings together three key groups of actors--undergraduate students, university researchers, and community organizations--drawing on and…

Writing as both instructors and students who worked together in the undergraduate course "Water Justice," we reflect on the limits and possibilities of engaging in anticolonial teaching-learning practices within the ongoing contexts of settler colonialism and racial violence that shapes universities. We describe how we designed…

Including undergraduate research in STEM education is a well-supported and growing high-impact practice that has been made much more scalable through integrating these experiences into the classroom. Here we describe a new biochemistry Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) that follows a design-to-data workflow with a strong…

The Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Pomona College has long worked to create an inclusive and welcoming space for all individuals to study mathematics. Many years ago, our approach to the lack of diversity we saw in our majors was remediation through programming, which sought to ameliorate student deficits. More recently, however, we…

STEM-related educational outreach offers students enriching opportunities to become more familiar with science, in terms of how it relates to their daily lives and with respect to possible career paths that they might want to follow. At the same time, graduate student trainees providing that outreach act as important resources for elementary and…

A course is described where students are engaged in an inquiry-based quarter-long research project to synthesize a known pharmaceutical target. Students use literature search engines, such as Reaxys and SciFinder, and the primary chemical literature as resources to plan and perform the synthesis of their pharmaceutical target. Through this…

It has become clear in current scientific pedagogy that the emersion of students in the scientific process in terms of designing, implementing, and analyzing experiments is imperative for their education; as such, it has been our goal to model this active learning process in the classroom and laboratory in the context of a genuine scientific…

During a review of undergraduate programs at the University of California at Los Angeles, Judith L. Smith, vice provost for undergraduate education, was struck by an uncomfortable realization: Too many majors demanded too little from students. Some students could graduate without ever taking a senior seminar or completing a substantial research…

Seafloor exploration being done by scientists is an ideal way to introduce students to technology as a tool for inquiry. The same technology that allows scientists to share data in near real time can also provide students the tools to become researchers. NOAA's Ocean Explorer Explorations website is a rich research data bank that can be used by…

Chemists continue to work at the forefront of materials science research. Recent advances include application of bioengineering to produce plastics from renewable biomass instead of petroleum, generation of paper-based batteries, and development of phototriggerable microcapsules for chemical delivery. In this article, the author provides summaries…

In this article, the author discusses how learning to effectively conduct, analyze, and present research has had an impact on her academic success, her ongoing development as an ESL teacher, and her proposals and protocols as the ESL department coordinator at an adult school in the Bay Area. The author triangulates these 3 areas of impact to…

In this article, the author shares how she was able to help young choreographers in East Oakland, California, to find their own creative voices, choose new movement styles and discover dance as a way to express something important and meaningful about their lives through their two-year dance history project. East Oakland School of the Arts (EOSA)…

Innovations in search and retrieval have provided librarians with some of their most exciting challenges as a profession. Yet even as new tools flood the academic library commons, direct, person-to-person information counseling is still needed, some would say more than ever. Consequently, it can be very useful to study how users conduct new…