Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) are attractive solutions for scaling undergraduate research experiences at primarily undergraduate teaching institutions, where resources for faculty research activities can be limited. The Sustainable Interdisciplinary Research to Inspire Undergraduate Success (SIRIUS) project is a unique…

Citizen science is recognized as an important tool to engage the public in important scientific and environmental issues that impact them. Mosquito surveillance-based citizen science in college curricula have not received much attention even though its usage has the potential to actively engage students in inquiry and elevate student support for…

The field of science education has long advocated for students to leave K-12 education with an appreciation for the diversity of research methods scientists employ in order to effectively engage with research generated across many scientific fields of study. Yet, research has indicated that students typically believe research proceeds according to…

We report the design of a low-cost electrochemical workstation and open-source graphical user interface capable of performing a variety of electrochemical methods in an undergraduate teaching laboratory. The instrument--based on the popular Arduino microcontroller board--can be constructed from common components for $40 USD. The modular design of…

Engaging students actively in assessment, using a range of formative activities, consistently over sustained periods is a common recommendation in the assessment for learning literature. Despite this, practice still lags behind. Our case study aims to bridge the widening gap between theory and practice by illustrating the application of recent…

We have developed a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that can be carried out in the context of an existing second-semester or upper-level organic laboratory course. In this three-week laboratory module, students synthesize a small library of molecules, test them in a robust biological assay, and design a new compound library…

Despite the current interest in Open Science in the scientific community, it is not clear if Open Science will succeed in higher education. Open Science is based on three basic ideas: open data, open results, and open publication. If these principles can be successfully implemented, it will allow for much greater participation in the scientific…

Advancing equity and justice in undergraduate biology education requires research to address the experiences of disabled students. Scholars working in disability studies have developed models of disability that inform Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER). To date, DBER literature has been predominantly informed by the medical and social…

The chemical experiment is designed for undergraduates majoring in chemistry, energy, and environment. The intended purpose is that the students will comprehend the reaction mechanism of photocatalytic reduction of CO[subscript 2] through hands-on experiments and deepen their understanding of sustainable energy technologies. More importantly, the…

This manuscript describes the implementation of a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) sequence in chemistry that uses research to link a lower division, organic chemistry course to an upper-division, analytical chemistry course. In the CURE sequence, students created a library of modified sugar molecules during CURE-1, Organic,…

We present a course-embedded undergraduate research module that involves real-time polymerase chain reaction testing for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in environmental samples. A positive control RNA was constructed and two RNA extraction methods were compared and a range of primers were available to compare. Using a combination of published…

This paper examines student experiences in a workshop-based undergraduate research experience studying the activity and inhibition of salivary amylase that provides students with the chance to participate in authentic scientific research prior to the start of their undergraduate studies, following the structure of a course-based undergraduate…

Society and education are inherently ableist. Disabled people are routinely excluded from education, or have poorer outcomes within educational systems. Improving educational experiences and outcomes for people of color has required educators to design antiracist curricula that explicitly address racial inequality. Here, we explore parallel…

In this article, the authors showcase 1) how they used assessment and evaluation strategies to determine the efficacy of field-based experiences in biology and 2) how they used this data to develop a new field--based course into a departmental intervention to foster inclusion of marginalized student populations in the life sciences. The authors…

Citizen science is a research collaboration between scientists and volunteers who provide data for education, conservation, and environmental protection. Volunteers, often the locals in the area, provide data on species occurrence while researchers perform distribution mapping or other data analysis. Social networking sites including Facebook,…