The basics

Welcome to

In this inaugural post, we'll address

• What is a CURE? What is a CURE not?
• What are the goals of this blog?
• Why CURE?

What is a CURE?

CURE stands for Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience. The essence of a CURE is to augment undergraduate college-level laboratory or practical courses with experiences that more closely approach the real-world experiences in scientific research that students would experience in a career.

Past and present approaches for teaching hands-on skills to undergraduates often focus on presenting students with an academic term worth of laboratory manual exercises. Each week, the student follows the steps outlined in the protocol in order hopefully to achieve the desired experimental results. Although learning techniques in a hands-on manner is, in our opinion, definitely necessary for budding scientists, there comes a point at which students need more intellectual engagement with the material beyond simply learning how to follow a prepared experimental protocol.

In its simplest form, then, faculty that design and instruct CUREs incorporate the ability for students to experience the entire scientific method, including

• learning what evidence already exists
• forming a hypothesis
• creating an experimental design
• conduct the experiment
• collecting, analyzing and interpreting data
• communicating results

What is a CURE not?

From the student perspective, a CURE is not: coming to class and being instructed exactly what to do in order to address a question whose answer is already known. These are sometimes referred to as "cookie-cutter" lab activities. In contrast, scientists don't know in advance the answer to the question they pursue in their research, so one of the overarching motivations to design a CURE module or course is to help students more fundamentally realize that science is more than memorizing facts - answers that are already known.

Science is the process of exploring the unknown in such a controlled and rigorous manner that we can definitively support or reject a hypothesis based on data. More often than not, experimental designs must be revised many times until they are optimized to collect the quality and quantity of data necessary to test a hypothesis. After that, many hypotheses are not supported by the experimental data anyway! Providing this perspective, and actively helping students develop perseverance and a growth mindset, will help them in many aspects of life beyond your lab course.

These are some of the reasons that the National Science Foundation (and American Association for the Advancement of Science; National Institutes of Health; Howard Hughes Medical Institute) called for making research experiences an integral component of biology education for all students in Vision and Change (2011). Likewise, the American Association of Colleges and Universities have listed undergraduate research in the top 10 high-impact practices.

What are the goals of this blog?

Some of the first content we will cover includes an honest evaluation of the benefits and drawbacks, both to students and to faculty, of implementing a CURE.

In future posts, we will also discuss topics like:

• the essential components found in many successful CUREs
• best practices for planning and running a CURE
• how to address issues as they arise

Ultimately, we hope to build a community of engaged science teachers who can help each other elevate our profession. With prescriptions to your CURE-related needs, we'll be your CURxpert and help you better prepare our students to be information-literate, evidence-based decision makers who are life-long learners.

Why CURE?

In addition to helping students appreciate the scientific method and how much attention to detail and rigor must be invested in experiments, there are more basic reasons for students and for faculty to engage in CUREs.

From the student perspective, the most important reasons go hand-in-hand: CUREs are one solution to a social justice issue. As students at many universities advance from their first year or two as undergraduates, only some will have the social capital (personal connections, and understanding of how the university system works - from parents, older siblings, or others) to know that they can ask faculty to join their research groups as volunteer interns (sometimes for credit). This is how an often privileged fraction of the student body gets a leg up for future opportunities like applying for scholarships and fellowships, attending and presenting at conferences, better letters of recommendation for jobs and for admission to advanced professional degrees (e.g. M.D.) and graduate degrees (e.g. M.S., Ph.D.). By incorporating research into the undergraduate curriculum, we hope to level the playing field a bit by giving all students more exposure to authentic research practices. At the same time, students with less social capital often come from otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g. financially, minority group underrepresented in science, or in the first generation of their family to attend college). Thus, CUREs might also improve diversity in scientific fields.

For teachers, there are also reasons to actively engage in developing and running CUREs. For faculty who have sizable teaching loads, CUREs can be a valuable (sometimes critical) way to accomplish research while teaching! Many faculty use CUREs to advance their research programs, especially in trying high-risk (of failure, not of injury!) experiments and obtaining preliminary data for grant proposals. Likewise, for faculty who have little financial support of research, teaching a CURE can help supplement a research budget by leveraging the department budget and/or student lab fees associated with that course. Such activities may also be looked favorably upon by funding agencies (if CUREs can be used as an outlet for broader impacts, for example) and in the promotion and tenure process.

Most critically, both teachers and students benefit two really important CURE outcomes:
Learning new things: faculty are life-long learners (that's why we didn't want to leave school!), and participating in a CURE can help push us a little bit out of our disciplinary comfort zones. CUREs also provide unique opportunities for many students to work closely with faculty in a laboratory setting and learn how to design experiments and to think like a scientist.
Engagement: students report that they are more excited about participating in CUREs than traditional lab courses, and so do faculty!

Some benefits of CUREs for students and faculty

If you are interested in teaching a CURE, or if you are skeptical, we strongly recommend reading some of the data that Brownell et al. collected from 61 faculty who teach CUREs in their manuscript, "Each to their own CURE: Faculty who teach Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences report why you too should teach a CURE." Among many reasons, those faculty participants reported intellectual engagement among the many reasons to incorporating their research into the undergraduate curriculum.