Professor Donald Terndrup will be leading the discussion at this week’s Diversity Journal Club. The event will be hybrid and will meet in the large conference room. Information on a Zoom connection will follow in an email announcement.
Topic from Dr Terndrup:
We will talk about CURE courses, where the acronym means Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences. These are classes in which the primary activity is research, with the goal of teaching students how to work on open-ended problems for which neither the instructor nor the students know the answer. CURE courses can provide research experiences “at scale,” breaking free of the small-group or individual-student model of undergraduate research.
There is considerable research showing generally that research experiences are valuable for forming a student’s identity as a scientist. This can be especially important for students from groups who are underrepresented in the STEM fields.
If you did not yet read one of the papers from last the last DJC, please review Kaitlyn Atkins et al. 2020, “Looking at Myself in the Future”: how mentoring shapes scientific identity for STEM students from underrepresented groups.” It is available (open access) at
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-020-00242-3
I will give a brief summary of a very long report titled “Integrating Discovery-based Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum”. It is available for online reading at
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/21851/chapter/1
and you can download the whole thing if you create a free account with National Academies Press.
I will conclude with a summary of a recent workshop I attended on CURE courses, with some thoughts about how we could incorporate such classes into the Astronomy major. For more information on CURE courses, see
Comments and ideas from the undergraduates will be especially welcome.
