Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Can Make Scientific Research More Inclusive

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Abstract

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) may be a more inclusive entry point to scientific research than independent research experiences, and the implementation of CUREs at the introductory level may therefore be a way to improve the diversity of the scientific community.

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Assessment of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences: A Meeting Report

Lisa Auchincloss, Sandra Laursen, Janet Branchaw … (2014)

Students can work with the same data at the same time and with the same tools as research scientists. iPlant Education, Outreach & Training Group (2008, personal communication) INTRODUCTION Numerous calls for reform in undergraduate biology education have emphasized the value of undergraduate research (e.g., American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011). These calls are based on a growing body of research that documents how students benefit from research experiences (Kremer and Bringle, 1990; Kardash, 2000; Rauckhorst et al., 2001; Hathaway et al., 2002; Bauer and Bennett, 2003; Lopatto, 2004, 2007; Lopatto and Tobias, 2010; Seymour et al., 2004; Hunter et al., 2007; Russell et al., 2007; Laursen et al., 2010; Thiry and Laursen, 2011). Undergraduates who participate in research internships (also called research apprenticeships, undergraduate research experiences, or research experiences for undergraduates [REUs]) report positive outcomes, such as learning to think like a scientist, finding research exciting, and intending to pursue graduate education or careers in science (Kardash, 2000; Laursen et al., 2010; Lopatto and Tobias, 2010). Research experiences are thought to be especially beneficial for women and underrepresented minority students, presumably because they support the development of relationships with more senior scientists and with peers who can offer critical support to students who might otherwise leave the sciences (Gregerman et al., 1998; Barlow and Villarejo, 2004; Eagan et al., 2011). Yet most institutions lack the resources to involve all or even most undergraduates in a research internship (Wood, 2003; Desai et al., 2008; Harrison et al., 2011). Faculty members have developed alternative approaches to engage students in research with the aim of offering these educational benefits to many more students (Wei and Woodin, 2011). One approach that is garnering increased attention is what we call a course-based undergraduate research experience, or CURE. CUREs involve whole classes of students in addressing a research question or problem that is of interest to the scientific community. As such, CUREs have the potential to expand undergraduates’ access to and involvement in research. We illustrate this in Table 1 by comparing CUREs with research internships, in which undergraduates work one-on-one with a mentor, either a graduate student, technician, postdoctoral researcher, or faculty member. Table 1. Features of CUREs compared with research internships CUREs Research internships Scale Many students Few students Mentorship structure One instructor to many students One instructor to one student Enrollment Open to all students in a course Open to a selected or self-selecting few Time commitment Students invest time primarily in class Students invest time primarily outside class Setting Teaching lab Faculty research lab CUREs offer the capacity to involve many students in research (e.g., Rowland et al., 2012) and can serve all students who enroll in a course—not only self-selecting students who seek out research internships or who participate in specialized programs, such as honors programs or programs that support research participation by disadvantaged students. Moreover, CUREs can be integrated into introductory-level courses (Dabney-Smith, 2009; Harrison et al., 2011) and thus have the potential to exert a greater influence on students’ academic and career paths than research internships that occur late in an undergraduate's academic program and thus serve primarily to confirm prior academic or career choices (Hunter et al., 2007). Entry into CUREs is logistically straightforward; students simply enroll in the course. Research internships often require an application (e.g., to REU sites funded by the National Science Foundation [NSF]) or searching and networking to find faculty interested in involving undergraduates in research. For students, CUREs may reduce the stress associated with balancing a research internship with course work during a regular academic term (Rowland et al., 2012). CUREs may also offer different types of opportunities for students to develop ownership of projects, as they ask their own questions or analyze their own samples. Although this can be the case for research internships, it may be less common, given the pressure on research groups to complete and publish the work outlined in grant proposals. In both environments, beginning undergraduate researchers more often contribute to ongoing projects rather than developing their own independent projects. Opportunities for the latter are important, as work from Hanauer and colleagues (2012) suggests that students’ development of a sense of ownership can contribute to their persistence in science. The Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Network (CUREnet; http://curenet.franklin.uga.edu) was initiated in 2012 with funding from NSF to support CURE instruction by addressing topics, problems, and opportunities inherent to integrating research experiences into undergraduate courses. During early discussions, the CUREnet community identified a need for a clearer definition of what constitutes a CURE and a need for systematic exploration of how students are affected by participating in CUREs. Thus, a small working group with expertise in CURE design and assessment was assembled in September 2013 to: Draft an operational definition of a CURE; Summarize research on CUREs, as well as findings from studies of undergraduate research internships that would be useful for thinking about how students are influenced by participating in CUREs; and Identify areas of greatest need with respect to evaluation of CUREs and assessment of CURE outcomes. In this paper, we summarize the meeting discussion and offer recommendations for next steps in the assessment of CUREs. CUREs DEFINED The first aim of the meeting was to define a CURE. We sought to answer the question: How can a CURE be distinguished from other laboratory learning experiences? This allows us to make explicit to students how a CURE may differ from their other science course work and to distinguish a CURE from other types of learning experiences for the purposes of education research and evaluation. We began by discussing what we mean by “research.” We propose that CUREs involve students in the following: Use of scientific practices. Numerous policy documents, as well as an abundance of research on the nature and practice of science, indicate that science research involves the following activities: asking questions, building and evaluating models, proposing hypotheses, designing studies, selecting methods, using the tools of science, gathering and analyzing data, identifying meaningful variation, navigating the messiness of real-world data, developing and critiquing interpretations and arguments, and communicating findings (National Research Council [NRC], 1996; Singer et al., 2006; Duschl et al., 2007; Bruck et al., 2008; AAAS, 2011; Quinn et al., 2011). Individuals engaged in science make use of a variety of techniques, such as visualization, computation, modeling, and statistical analysis, with the aim of generating new scientific knowledge and understanding (Duschl et al., 2007; AAAS, 2011). Although it is unrealistic to expect students to meaningfully participate in all of these practices during a single CURE, we propose that the opportunity to engage in multiple scientific practices (e.g., not only data collection) is a CURE hallmark. Discovery. Discovery is the process by which new knowledge or insights are obtained. Science research aims to generate new understanding of the natural world. As such, discovery in the context of a CURE implies that the outcome of an investigation is unknown to both the students and the instructor. When the outcomes of their work are not predetermined, students must make decisions such as how to interpret their data, when to track down an anomaly and when to ignore it as “noise,” or when results are sufficiently convincing to draw conclusions (Duschl et al., 2007; Quinn et al., 2011). Discovery carries with it the risk of unanticipated outcomes and ambiguous results because the work has not been done before. Discovery also necessitates exploration and evidence-based reasoning. Students and instructors must have some familiarity with the current body of knowledge in order to contribute to it and must determine whether the new evidence gathered is sufficient to support the assertion that new knowledge has been generated (Quinn et al., 2011). We propose that discovery in the context of a CURE means that students are addressing novel scientific questions aimed at generating and testing new hypotheses. In addition, when their work is considered collectively, students’ findings offer some new insight into how the natural world works. Broadly relevant or important work. Because CUREs provide opportunities for students to build on and contribute to current science knowledge, they also present opportunities for impact and action beyond the classroom. In some CUREs, this may manifest as authorship or acknowledgment in a science research publication (e.g., Leung et al., 2010; Pope et al., 2011). In other CUREs, students may develop reports of interest to the local community, such as a report on local water quality or evidence-based recommendations for community action (e.g., Savan and Sider, 2003). We propose that CUREs involve students in work that fits into a broader scientific endeavor that has meaning beyond the particular course context. (We choose the language of “broader relevance or importance” rather than the term “authenticity” because views on the authenticity of a learning experience may shift over time [Rahm et al., 2003] and may differ among students, instructors, and the broader scientific community.) Collaboration. Science research increasingly involves teams of scientists who contribute diverse skills to tackling large and complex problems (Quinn et al., 2011). We propose that group work is not only a common practical necessity but also an important pedagogical element of CUREs because it exposes students to the benefits of bringing together many minds and hands to tackle a problem (Singer et al., 2006). Through collaboration, students can improve their work in response to peer feedback. Collaboration also develops important intellectual and communication skills as students verbalize their thinking and practice communicating biological ideas and interpretations either to fellow students in the same discipline or to students in other disciplines. This may also encourage students’ metacognition—solidifying their thinking and helping them to recognize shortcomings in their knowledge and reasoning (Chi et al., 1994; Lyman, 1996; Smith et al., 2009; Tanner, 2009). Iteration. Science research is inherently iterative because new knowledge builds on existing knowledge. Hypotheses are tested and theories are developed through the accumulation of evidence over time by repeating studies and by addressing research questions using multiple approaches with diverse methods. CUREs generally involve students in iterative work, which can occur at multiple levels. Students may design, conduct, and interpret an investigation and, based on their results, repeat or revise aspects of their work to address problems or inconsistencies, rule out alternative explanations, or gather additional data to support assertions (NRC, 1996; Quinn et al., 2011). Students may also build on and revise aspects of other students’ investigations, whether within a single course to accumulate a sufficiently large data set for analysis or across successive offerings of the course to measure and manage variation, further test preliminary hypotheses, or increase confidence in previous findings. Students learn by trying, failing, and trying again, and by critiquing one another's work, especially the extent to which claims can be supported by evidence (NRC, 1996; Duschl et al., 2007; Quinn et al., 2011). These activities, when considered in isolation, are not unique to CUREs. Rather, we propose that it is the integration of all five dimensions that makes a learning experience a CURE. Of course, CUREs will vary in the frequency and intensity of each type of activity. We present the dimensions in Table 2 and delineate how they are useful for distinguishing between the following four laboratory learning environments: Table 2. Dimensions of different laboratory learning contexts Dimension Traditional Inquiry CURE Internship Use of science practices Students engage in … Few scientific practices Multiple scientific practices Multiple scientific practices Multiple scientific practices Study design and methods are … Instructor driven Student driven Student or instructor driven Student or instructor driven Discovery Purpose of the investigation is … Instructor defined Student defined Student or instructor defined Student or instructor defined Outcome is … Known to students and instructors Varied Unknown Unknown Findings are … Previously established May be novel Novel Novel Broader relevance or importance Relevance of students’ work … Is limited to the course Is limited to the course Extends beyond the course Extends beyond the course Students’ work presents opportunities for action … Rarely Rarely Often Often Collaboration Collaboration occurs … Among students in a course Among students in a course Among students, teaching assistants, instructor in a course Between student and mentor in a research group Instructor's role is … Instruction Facilitation Guidance and mentorship Guidance and mentorship Iteration Risk of generating “messy” data are … Minimized Significant Inherent Inherent Iteration is built into the process … Not typically Occasionally Often Often A traditional laboratory course, in which the topic and methods are instructor defined; there are clear “cookbook” directions and a predetermined outcome that is known to students and to the instructor (Domin, 1999; Weaver et al., 2008); An inquiry laboratory course, in which students participate in many of the cognitive and behavioral practices that are commonly performed by scientists; typically, the outcome is unknown to students, and they may be challenged to generate their own methods. The motivation for the inquiry is to challenge the students, rather than contribute to a larger body of knowledge (Domin 1999; Olson and Loucks-Horsley, 2000; Weaver et al., 2008); A CURE, in which students address a research question or problem that is of interest to the broader community with an outcome that is unknown both to the students and to the instructor (Domin 1999; Bruck et al., 2008; Weaver et al., 2008); and A research internship, in which a student is apprenticed to a senior researcher (faculty, postdoc, grad student, etc.) to help advance a science research project (Seymour et al., 2004). The five dimensions comprise a framework that can be tested empirically by characterizing how a particular dimension is manifested in a program, developing scales to measure the degree or intensity of each dimension, and determining whether the dimensions in part or as a whole are useful for distinguishing CUREs from other laboratory learning experiences. Once tested, we believe that this framework will be useful to instructors, institutional stakeholders, education researchers, and evaluators. Instructors may use the framework to delineate their instructional approach, clarify what students will be expected to do, and articulate their learning objectives. For example, in traditional laboratory instruction, students may collect and analyze data but generally do not build or evaluate models or communicate their findings to anyone except the instructor. During inquiry laboratory instruction, students may be able to complete a full inquiry cycle and thus engage at some level in the full range of scientific practices. Students in CUREs and research internships may engage in some scientific practices in depth, but neglect others, depending on the particular demands of the research and the structure of the project. As instructors define how their course activities connect to desired student outcomes, they can also identify directions for formative and summative assessment. Education researchers and evaluators may use the framework to characterize particular instructional interventions with the aim of determining which dimensions, to what degree and intensity, correlate with desired student outcomes. For instance, students who engage in the full range of scientific practices could reasonably be expected to improve their skills across the range of practices, while students who participate in only a subset of practices can only be expected to improve in those specific practices. Similarly, the extent to which students have control over the methods they employ may influence their sense of ownership over the investigation, thus increasing their motivation and perhaps contributing to their self-identification as scientists. Using this framework to identify critical elements of CUREs and how they relate (or not) to important student outcomes can inform both the design of CUREs and their placement in a curriculum. CURRENT KNOWLEDGE FROM ASSESSMENT OF CUREs With this definition in mind, the meeting then turned to summarizing what is known from the study of CUREs, primarily in biology and chemistry. Assessment and evaluation of CUREs has been limited to a handful of multisite programs (e.g., Goodner et al., 2003; Hatfull et al., 2006; Lopatto et al., 2008, Caruso et al., 2009; Shaffer et al., 2010; Harrison et al., 2011) and projects led by individual instructors (e.g., Drew and Triplett 2008; Siritunga et al., 2011). For the most part, these studies have emphasized student perceptions of the outcomes they realize from participating in course-based research, such as the gains they have made in research skills or clarification of their intentions to pursue further education or careers in science. To date, very few studies of student learning during CUREs have been framed according to learning theories. With a few exceptions, studies of CUREs have not described pathways that students take to arrive at specific outcomes—in other words, what aspects of the CURE are important for students to achieve both short- and long-term gains. Some studies have compared CURE instruction with research internships and have found, in general, that students report many of the same gains (e.g., Shaffer et al., 2010). A handful of studies have compared student outcomes from CUREs with those from other laboratory learning experiences. For example, Russell and Weaver (2011) compared students’ views of the nature of science after completing a traditional laboratory, an inquiry laboratory, or a CURE. The researchers used an established approach developed by Lederman and colleagues (2002) to assess students’ views of the nature of science, but it is not clear whether students in this study chose to enroll in a traditional or CURE course or whether the groups differed in other ways that might influence the extent to which their views changed following their lab experiences. Students in all three environments—traditional, inquiry, and CURE—made gains in their views of the nature of scientific knowledge as experimental and theory based, but only students in the CURE showed progress in their views of science as creative and process based. When students who participated in a CURE or a traditional lab were queried 2 or 3 yr afterward, they continued to differ in their perceptions of the gains they made in understanding how to do research and in their confidence in doing research (Szteinberg and Weaver, 2013). In another study, Rowland and colleagues (2012) compared student reports of outcomes from what they called an active-learning laboratory undergraduate research experience (ALLURE, which is similar to a CURE) with those from a traditional lab course. Students could choose the ALLURE or traditional instruction, which may have resulted in a self-selection bias. Students in both environments reported increased confidence in their lab skills, including technical skills (e.g., pipetting) and analytical skills (e.g., deciding whether one experimental approach is better than another). Generally, students reported similar skill gains in both environments, indicating that students can develop confidence in their lab skills during both traditional and CURE/ALLURE experiences. Most studies reporting assessment of CUREs in the life sciences have made use of the Classroom Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) Survey (Lopatto and Tobias, 2010). The CURE Survey comprises three elements: 1) instructor report of the extent to which the learning experience resembles the practice of science research (e.g., the outcomes of the research are unknown, students have some input into the focus or design of the research); 2) student report of learning gains; and 3) student report of attitudes toward science. A series of Likert-type items probe students’ attitudes toward science and their educational and career interests, as well as students’ perceptions of the learning experience, the nature of science, their own learning styles, and the science-related skills they developed from participating in a CURE. Use of the CURE Survey has been an important first step in assessing student outcomes of these kinds of experiences. Yet this instrument is limited as a measure of the nature and outcomes of CUREs because some important information is missing about its overall validity. No information is available about its dimensionality—that is do student responses to survey items meant to represent similar underlying concepts correlate with each other, while correlating less with items meant to represent dissimilar concepts? For example, do responses to items about career interests correlate with themselves highly, but correlate less with items focused on attitudes toward science, a dissimilar concept? Other validity questions are also not addressed. For instance, does the survey measure all important aspects of CUREs and CURE outcomes, or are important variables missing? Is the survey useful for measuring a variety of CUREs in different settings, such as CUREs for majors or nonmajors, or CUREs at an introductory or advanced levels? Finally, is the survey a reliable measure—does the survey measure outcomes consistently over time and across different individuals and settings? To be consistent with the definition of CUREs given above, an assessment instrument must both touch on all five dimensions and elicit responses that capture other important aspects of CURE instruction that may be missing from this description. This will help ensure that the instrument has “content validity” (Trochim, 2006), meaning that the instrument can be used to measure all of the features important in a CURE learning experience. The CURE Survey relies on student perceptions of their own knowledge and skill gains, and like other such instruments, it is subject to concerns about the validity of self-report of learning gains. There is a very broad range of correlations between self-report measures of learning and measurements such as tests or expert judgments. Depending on which measures are compared, there may be a strong correlation, or almost no correlation, between self-reported data and relevant criteria (Falchikov and Boud, 1989). Validity problems with self-assessment can result from poor survey design, with survey items interpreted differently by different students, or from items designed in such a way that students are unable to recall key information or experiences (Bowman 2011; Porter et al., 2011). The tendency of respondents to give socially desirable answers is a familiar problem with self-reporting. Bowman and Hill (2011) found that student self-reporting of educational outcomes is subject to social bias; students respond more positively because they are either implicitly or explicitly aware of the desired response. A guarantee of anonymity mitigates this validity threat (Albanese et al., 2006). Respondents also give more valid responses when they have a clear idea of what they are assessing and have received frequent and clear feedback about their progress and abilities from others, and when respondents can remember what they did during the assessment period (Kuh, 2001). For example, in her study of the outcomes of undergraduate science research internships, Kardash (2000) compared perceptions of both student interns and faculty mentors of the gains interns made from participating in research. She found good agreement between interns and mentors on some skills, such as understanding concepts in the field and collecting data, but statistically significantly differences between mentor and intern ratings of other skills, with interns rating themselves more positively on their understanding of the importance of controls in research, their abilities to interpret results in light of original hypotheses, and their abilities to relate results to the “bigger picture.” More research is needed to understand the extent to which different students (majors, nonmajors, introductory, advanced, etc.) are able to accurately self-assess the diverse knowledge and skills they may develop from participating in CUREs. A few studies have focused on the psychosocial outcomes of participating in CUREs. One such study, conducted by Hanauer and colleagues (2012), documented the extent to which students developed a sense of ownership of the science projects they completed in a traditional laboratory course, a CURE involving fieldwork, or a research internship. Using linguistic analysis, the authors found that students in the CURE reported a stronger sense of ownership of their research projects compared with students who participated in traditional lab courses and research internships (Hanauer et al., 2012; Hanauer and Dolan, in press, 2014); these students also reported higher levels of persistence in science or medicine (Hanauer et al., 2012). Although the inferred relationship needs to be explored with a larger group of students and a more diverse set of CUREs, these results suggest that it is important to consider ownership and other psychosocial outcomes in future research and evaluation of CUREs. A few studies have explored whether and how different students experience CUREs differently and, in turn, realize different outcomes from CUREs. This is an especially noteworthy gap in the knowledge base, given the calls to engage all students in research experiences and that research has suggested that different students may realize different outcomes from participating in research (e.g., AAAS, 2011; Thiry et al., 2012). In one such study, Alkaher and Dolan (in press, 2014) interviewed students enrolled in a CURE, the Partnership for Research and Education in Plants for Undergraduates, at three different types of institutions (i.e., community college, liberal arts college, research university) in order to examine whether and how their sense of scientific self-authorship shifted during the CURE. Baxter-Magolda (1992) defined self-authorship as the “internal capacity to define one's beliefs, relations, and social identity” or, in this context, how one sees oneself with respect to science knowledge—as a consumer, user, or producer. Developing a sense of scientific self-authorship may be an important predictor of persistence in science, as students move from simply consuming science knowledge as it is presented to becoming critical users of science, and to seeing themselves as capable of contributing to the scientific body of knowledge. Alkaher and Dolan (in press, 2014) found that some CURE students made progress in their self-authorship because they perceived the CURE goals as important to the scientific community, yet the tasks were within their capacity to make a meaningful contribution. In contrast, other students struggled with the discovery nature of the CURE in comparison with their prior traditional lab learning experiences. They perceived their inability to find the “right answer” as reflecting their inability to do science. More research is needed to determine whether and how students’ backgrounds, motives, and interests influence how they experience CUREs, and whether they realize different outcomes as a result. NEXT STEPS FOR CURE ASSESSMENT Our discussion and collective knowledge of research on CUREs and undergraduate research internships revealed several gaps in our understanding of CUREs, which can be addressed by: Defining frameworks and learning theories that may help explain how students are influenced by participating in CUREs, and utilizing these frameworks or theories to design and study CUREs; Identifying and measuring the full range of important outcomes likely to occur in CURE contexts; Using valid and reliable measures, some of which have been used to study research internships or other undergraduate learning experiences and could be adapted for CURE use, as well as developing and testing new tools to assess CUREs specifically (see Weiss and Sosulski [2003] or Trochim [2006] for general explanations of validity and reliability in social science measurement); Establishing which outcomes are best documented using self-reporting, and developing new tools or adapting existing tools to measure other outcomes; and Gathering empirical evidence to identify the distinctive dimensions of CUREs and ways to characterize the degree to which they are present in a given CURE, as well as conducting investigations to characterize relationships between particular CURE dimensions or activities and student outcomes. Following these recommendations will require a collective, scholarly effort involving many education researchers and evaluators and many CUREs that are diverse in terms of students, instructors, activities, and institutional contexts. We suggest that priorities of this collective effort should be to: Use current knowledge from the study of CUREs, research internships, and other relevant forms of laboratory instruction (e.g., inquiry) to define short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes that may result from student participation in CUREs; Observe and characterize many diverse CUREs to identify the activities within CUREs likely to directly result in these short-term outcomes, delineating both rewards and difficulties students encounter as they participate; Use frameworks or theories and current knowledge to hypothesize pathways students may take toward achieving long-term outcomes—the connections between activities and short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes; Determine whether one can identify key short- and medium-term outcomes that serve as important “linchpins” or connecting points through which students progress to achieve desired long-term outcomes; and Assess the extent to which students achieve these key outcomes as a result of CURE instruction, using existing or novel instruments (e.g., surveys, interview protocols, tests) that have been demonstrated to be valid and reliable measures of the desired outcomes. At the front end, this process will require increased application of learning theories and consideration of the supporting research literature, but it is likely to result in many highly testable hypotheses and a more focused and informative approach to CURE assessment overall. For example, if we can define pathways from activities to outcomes, instructors will be better able to select activities to include or emphasize during CURE instruction and decide which short-term outcomes to assess. Education researchers and evaluators will be better able to hypothesize which aspects of CURE instruction are most critical for desired student outcomes and the most salient to study. Drawing from many of the references cited in this report, we have drafted a logic model for CURE instruction (Figure 1) as the first step in this process. (For more on logic models, see guidance from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation [2006].) The model includes the range of contexts, activities, outputs, and outcomes of CUREs that arose during our discussion. The model also illustrates hypothetical relationships between time, participation in CUREs, and short- and long-term outcomes resulting from CURE activities. Figure 1. CURE logic model. This model depicts the set of variables at play in CUREs identified by the authors. During CUREs, students can working individually, in groups, or with faculty (context, green box on left) to perform corresponding activities (middle, red boxes) that yield measurable outputs (middle, pink boxes). Activities and outputs are grouped according to the five related elements of CUREs (orange boxes and arrow). Possible CURE outcomes (blue) are ordered left to right according to when students might be able to demonstrate the outcome (blue arrow) and whether the outcome is likely to be achievable from participation in a single vs. multiple CUREs (blue triangle). It is important to recognize that, given the limited time frame and scope of any single CURE, students will not participate in all possible activities or achieve all possible outcomes depicted in the model. Rather, CURE instructors or evaluators could define a particular path and use it as a guide for designing program evaluations and assessing student outcomes. Figure 2 presents an example of how to do this with a focus on a subset of CURE activities and outcomes. It is a simplified pathway model based on findings from the research on undergraduate research internships and CUREs summarized above. Boxes in this model are potentially measurable waypoints, or steps, on a path that connects student participation in three CURE activities with the short-term outcomes students may realize during the CURE, medium-term outcomes they may realize at the end of or after the CURE, and potential long-term outcomes. Although each pathway is supported by evidence or hypotheses from the study of CUREs and research internships, these are not the only means to achieve long-term outcomes, and they do not often act alone. Rather, the model is intended to illustrate that certain short- and medium-term outcomes are likely to have a positive effect on linked long-term outcomes. See Urban and Trochim (2009) for a more detailed discussion of this approach. Figure 2. Example of a pathway model to guide CURE assessment. This model identifies a subset of activities (beige) students are likely to do during a CURE and the short- (pink), medium- (blue), and long- (green) term outcomes they may experience as a result. The arrows depict demonstrated or hypothesized relationships between activities and outcomes. (This figure is generated using software from the Cornell Office of Research and Evaluation [2010].) We explain below the example depicted in Figure 2, referencing explicit waypoints on the path with italics. This model is grounded in situated-learning theory (Lave and Wenger, 1991), which proposes that learning involves engagement in a “community of practice,” a group of people working on a common problem or endeavor (e.g., addressing a particular research question) and using a common set of practices (e.g., science practices). Situated-learning theory envisions learning as doing (e.g., presenting and evaluating work) and as belonging (e.g., interacting with faculty and peers, building networks), factors integral to becoming a practitioner (Wenger, 2008)—in the case of CUREs, becoming a scientist. Retention in a science major is a desired and measurable long-term outcome (bottom of Figure 2) that indicates students are making progress in becoming scientists and has been shown to result from participation in research (Perna et al., 2009; Eagan et al., 2013). Based on situated-learning theory, we hypothesize that three activities students might engage in are likely to lead to retention in a science major: design methods, present their work, and evaluate their own and others’ work during their research experience (Caruso et al., 2009; Harrison et al., 2011; Hanauer et al., 2012). These activities reflect the dimensions of “use of scientific practices” and “collaboration” described above. Following the right-hand path in the model, when students present their work and evaluate their own and others’ work, they will likely interact with each other and with faculty (Eagan et al., 2011). Interactions with faculty and interactions with peers may lead to improvements in students’ communication and collaboration skills, including their abilities to defend their work, negotiate, and make decisions about their research based on interactions (Ryder et al., 1999; Alexander et al., 2000; Seymour et al., 2004). Through these interactions, students may expand their professional networks, which may in turn offer increased access to mentoring (Packard, 2004; Eagan et al., 2011). Mentoring relationships, especially with faculty, connect undergraduates to networks that promote their education and career development by building their sense of scientific identity and defining their role within the broader scientific community (Crisp and Cruz, 2009; Hanauer, 2010; Thiry et al., 2010; Thiry and Laursen, 2011; Stanton-Salazar, 2011). Peer and faculty relationships also offer socio-emotional support that can foster students’ resilience and their ability to navigate the uncertainty inherent to science research (Chemers et al., 2011; Thiry and Laursen, 2011). Finally, research on factors that lead to retention in science majors indicates that increased science identity (Laursen et al., 2010; Estrada et al., 2011), ability to navigate uncertainty, and resilience are important precursors to a sense of belonging and ultimate retention (Gregerman et al., 1998; Zeldin and Pajares, 2000; Maton and Hrabowski, 2004; Seymour et al., 2004). The model also suggests that access to mentoring is a linchpin, a short- to medium-term outcome that serves as a connecting point through which activities are linked to long-term outcomes. Thus, access to mentoring might be assessed to diagnose students’ progress along the top pathway and predict the likelihood that they will achieve long-term outcomes. (For more insight into why assessing linchpins is particularly informative, see Urban and Trochim [2009].) Examples of measures that may be useful for testing aspects of this model and for which validity and reliability information is available include: the scientific identity scale developed by Chemers and colleagues (2011) and revised by Estrada and colleagues (2011); the student cohesiveness, teacher support, and cooperation scales of the What Is Happening in This Class? questionnaire (Dorman, 2003); and the faculty mentorship items published by Eagan and colleagues (2011). Data will need to be collected and analyzed using standard validation procedures to determine the usefulness of these scales for studying CUREs. Qualitative data from interviews or focus groups can be used to determine that students perceive these items as measuring relevant aspects of their CURE experiences and to confirm that they are interpreting the questions as intended. For example, developers of the Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment instrument used extensive interview data to identify key dimensions of student outcomes from research apprenticeship experiences, and then think-aloud interviews to test and refine the wording of survey items (Hunter et al., 2009). Interviews can also establish whether items apply to different groups of students. For example, items in the scientific identity scale (e.g., “I feel like I belong in the field of science”) may seem relevant, and thus “valid,” to science majors but not to non–science majors. Similarly, the faculty-mentoring items noted above (Eagan et al., 2011) include questions about whether faculty provided, for example, “encouragement to pursue graduate or professional study” or “an opportunity to work on a research project.” The first item will be most relevant to students who are enrolled in an advanced rather than an introductory CURE, while the second may be relevant only to students early enough in their undergraduate careers to have time to pursue a research internship. In addition, students may interpret the phrase “opportunity to work on a research project” in ways that are unrelated to mentorship by faculty, especially in the context of a CURE class with its research focus. Statistical analyses (e.g., factor analysis, calculation of Cronbach's alpha; Netemeyer et al., 2003) should confirm that the scales are consistent and stable—are they measuring what they are intended to measure and do they do so consistently? Such analyses would help determine whether students are responding as anticipated to particular items or scales and whether instruments developed to measure student outcomes of research internships can detect student growth from participation in CUREs, which are different experiences. We can also follow the left-hand path in this model with a focus on the CURE activities of designing methods and presenting work. This path is grounded in Baxter Magolda's (2003) work on students’ epistemological development and her theory of self-authorship. Specifically, as students take ownership of their learning, they transition from seeing themselves as consumers of knowledge to seeing themselves as producers of knowledge. Some students who design their own methods and present their work report an increased sense of ownership of the research (Hanauer et al., 2012; Hanauer and Dolan, 2014). Increased ownership has been shown to improve motivation and self-efficacy. Self-efficacy and motivation work in a positive-feedback loop to enhance one another and contribute to development of long-term outcomes, such as increased resilience (Graham et al., 2013). Social cognitive theory is useful for explaining this relationship: if people believe they are capable of accomplishing a task—described in the literature as self-efficacy—they are more likely to put forth effort, persist in the task, and be resilient in the face of failure (Bandura, 1986; Zeldin and Pajares, 2000). Self-efficacy has also been positively related to science identity (Zeldin and Pajares, 2000; Seymour et al., 2004; Hanauer, 2010; Estrada et al., 2011; Adedokun et al., 2013). Thus, self-efficacy becomes a linchpin that interacts closely with motivation and can be connected to retention in a science major. Existing measures that may be useful for testing this model and for which validity and reliability information is available include: the Project Ownership Survey (Hanauer and Dolan, 2014), scientific self-efficacy and scientific identity scales (Chemers et al., 2011; Estrada et al., 2011); and the self-authorship items from the Career Decision Making Survey (Creamer et al., 2010). Again, data would need to be collected and analyzed using standard validation procedures to determine the usefulness of these scales for studying CUREs. When considering what to include in a model or which pathways to emphasize, we encourage CURE stakeholders to remember that each CURE is in its own stage of development and has its own life cycle. Some are just starting and others are well established. CUREs at the beginning stages of implementation are likely to be better served by evaluating how well the program is being implemented before evaluating downstream student outcomes. Thus, early in the development of a CURE, those who are assessing CUREs may want to model a limited set of activities, outputs, and short-term outcomes. CUREs at later stages of development may focus more of their evaluation efforts on long-term student outcomes because earlier evaluations have demonstrated stability of the program's implementation. At this point, findings regarding student outcomes can more readily be attributed to participation in the CURE. Last, we would like to draw some comparisons between CUREs and research internships because these different experiences are likely to offer unique and complementary ways of engaging undergraduates in research that could be informative for CURE assessment. As noted above, a handful of studies indicate that CURE students may realize some of the same outcomes observed for students in research internships (Goodner et al., 2003; Drew and Triplett 2008; Lopatto et al., 2008; Caruso et al., 2009; Shaffer et al., 2010; Harrison et al., 2011). Yet, differences between CUREs and research internships (Table 1) are likely to influence the extent to which students achieve any particular outcome. For example, CUREs may offer different opportunities for student input and autonomy (Patel et al., 2009; Hanauer et al., 2012; Hanauer and Dolan, 2014; Table 2). The structure of CUREs may allow undergraduates to assume more responsibility in project decision making and take on leadership roles that are less often available in research internships. CUREs may involve more structured group work, providing avenues for students to develop analytical and collaboration skills as they explain or defend their thinking and provide feedback to one another. In addition, CURE students may have increased opportunities to develop and express skepticism because they are less likely to see their peers as authority figures. Alternatively, some CURE characteristics may limit the nature or extent of outcomes that students realize. CUREs take place in classroom environments with a much higher student–faculty ratio than is typical of UREs. With fewer experienced researchers to model scientific practices and provide feedback, students may be less likely to develop a strong understanding of the nature of science or a scientific identity. The amount of time students may spend doing the work in a CURE course is likely to be significantly less than what they would spend in a research internship. Students who enroll in CURE courses may be less interested in research, which may affect their own and classmates’ motivation and longer-term outcomes related to motivation. Research interns are more likely to develop close collegial relationships with faculty and other researchers, such as graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and other research staff, who can in turn expand their professional network. In addition, CURE instructors may have limited specialized knowledge of the science that underpins the CURE. Thus, CURE students may not have access to sufficient mentorship or expertise to maximize the scientific and learning outcomes. SUMMARY This report is a first attempt to capture the distinct characteristics of CUREs and discuss ways in which they can be systematically evaluated. Utilizing current research on CUREs and on research internships, we identify and describe five dimensions of CURE instruction: use of science practices, discovery, broader relevance or importance, iteration, and collaboration. We describe how these elements might vary among different laboratory learning experiences and recommend an approach to CURE assessment that can characterize CURE activities and outcomes. We hope that our discussion draws attention to the importance of developing, observing, and characterizing many diverse CUREs. We also hope that this report successfully highlights the enormous potential of CUREs, not only to support students in becoming scientists, but also to provide research experiences to increasing numbers of students who will enter the workforce as teachers, employers, entrepreneurs, and young professionals. We intend for this report to serve as a starting point for a series of informed discussions and education research projects that will lead to far greater understanding of the usages, value, and impacts of CUREs, ultimately resulting in cost-effective, widely accessible, quality research experiences for a large number of undergraduate students.

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Barriers to Faculty Pedagogical Change: Lack of Training, Time, Incentives, and…Tensions with Professional Identity?

Sara E. Brownell, Kimberly D. Tanner (2012)

The time has come for all biology faculty, particularly those who teach undergraduates, to develop a coordinated and sustainable plan for implementing sound principles of teaching and learning to improve the quality of undergraduate biology education nationwide. (Vision and Change, 2011, xv) Recent calls for reform, such as Vision and Change: A Call to Action, have described a vision to transform undergraduate biology education and have noted the need for faculty to promote this change toward a more iterative and evidence-based approach to teaching (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011). A key challenge is convincing many faculty—not just a handful of faculty scattered across the country but the majority of life sciences faculty in every institution—to change the way they teach. Few would disagree that this is an ambitious goal. Change is difficult in any setting, but changing academic teaching appears to be especially tricky. Calls for change imply that the pedagogical approaches our own professors and mentors modeled and taught us might not be the best way to engage large numbers of diverse populations of undergraduates in our discipline. This effort potentially also involves telling faculty that what they have been doing for the past 5, 10, or even 30 yr may not the most effective approach, especially for today's students. Widespread change in undergraduate biology teaching—or in any of the sciences for that matter—has been documented to be difficult (Henderson et al., 2011). The general perception is that while there are pockets of change driven by individual faculty, there is little evidence that the majority of our faculty members are reconsidering their approach to teaching, despite dozens of formal policy documents calling for reform, hundreds of biology education research publications on the subject, and the availability and award of substantial amounts of external grant funding to stimulate change toward evidence-based teaching (Tagg, 2012). In fact, it is somewhat perplexing that we as scientists are resistant to such change. We are well trained in how to approach problems analytically, collect data, make interpretations, form conclusions, and then revise our experimental hypotheses and protocols accordingly. If we are experts at making evidence-based decisions in our experimental laboratories, then what forces are at play that impede us from adopting equally iterative and evidence-based approaches to teaching in our classrooms? What can we—as members of a community of biologists dedicated to promoting scholarly biology teaching—do to identify and remove barriers that may be impeding widespread change in faculty approaches to teaching? A substantial body of literature has highlighted many factors that impede faculty change, the most common of which are a lack of training, time, and incentives. However, there may be other barriers—unacknowledged and unexamined barriers—that might prove to be equally important. In particular, the tensions between a scientist's professional identity and the call for faculty pedagogical change are rarely, if ever, raised as a key impediment to widespread biology education reform. In this article, we propose that scientists’ professional identities—how they view themselves and their work in the context of their discipline and how they define their professional status—may be an invisible and underappreciated barrier to undergraduate science teaching reform, one that is not often discussed, because very few of us reflect upon our professional identity and the factors that influence it. Our primary goal in this article is to raise the following question: Will addressing training, time, and incentives be sufficient to achieve widespread pedagogical change in undergraduate biology education, or will modifying our professional identity also be necessary? FOCUSING ON THE BIG THREE: LACK OF TRAINING, TIME, AND INCENTIVES Insufficient training, time, and incentives are among the most commonly cited barriers for faculty change, and the focus of most of the current efforts to understand and promote faculty pedagogical change (Henderson et al., 2010, 2011; AAAS, 2011; Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching [FIRST] IV, 2012; National Academies of Science/Howard Hughes Medical Institute [NAS/HHMI], 2012). In terms of training, many faculty have indicated they feel ill-equipped to change the way they teach and thus would like access to structured, formal training. Unsurprisingly, we as faculty may not be knowledgeable about what constitutes a student-centered classroom (Hativa, 1995; Miller et al., 2000; Winter et al., 2001; Hanson and Moser, 2003; Luft et al., 2004; Yarnall et al., 2007) or we may be unconvinced as to whether new teaching methods are really more effective than traditional instruction (Van Driel et al., 1997; Miller et al., 2000; Winter et al., 2001; Yarnall et al., 2007). Even if faculty are aware of reform efforts, science faculty will most likely not have had training in these types of teaching methods (Rushin et al., 1997; Handlesman et al., 2004; Ebert-May et al., 2011). Vision and Change specifically highlights the need for training of early-career scientists, including postdoctoral fellows and assistant professors (AAAS, 2011). Efforts such as the NSF-funded FIRST IV program and the NAS/HHMI Summer Institutes for Undergraduate Biology Education are examples of programs intended to provide postdoctoral scholars and faculty of all ranks, respectively, with the needed expertise in innovative teaching through hands-on training (FIRST IV, 2012; NAS/HHMI, 2012). Although it is too early to gauge the long-term success of these programs, one wonders whether some of these training efforts may be hindered by the lack of buy-in from the home institutions. After faculty go to nationally or regionally organized training workshops and become excited about implementing new teaching strategies, are they met with support or resistance from their colleagues upon return to their home institutions? Furthermore, trying to achieve pedagogical change through 1-d or even 1-wk training sessions seems incongruent with the notion that pedagogical change for any instructor is an iterative and ongoing process. Even the most well intentioned of us forget what we learned, need extra practice, and often revert to our old habits when we are, inevitably, pressed for time. So although it is necessary to provide scientists with training opportunities demonstrating new ways of teaching, training alone is likely insufficient by itself to achieve lasting pedagogical change. What about issues of time? With the often-competing demands of research and teaching, faculty often find it difficult to carve out sufficient time to reflect deeply upon their teaching. While faculty at different types of institutions have varying degrees of teaching responsibilities, faculty at most 4-yr institutions are also required to do research and obtain significant external grant funding. Although this expectation is most explicit at R1 research institutions, it also exists at many comprehensive institutions, and even at small liberal arts colleges. Regardless of current faculty teaching loads, there is no doubt that the process of changing an instructional technique is time- and labor-intensive (Krockover et al., 2002; Howland and Wedman, 2004; Stevenson et al., 2005; Schneider and Pickett, 2006; Malicky et al., 2007). Additionally, research has shown that interactive teaching, as compared with traditional lecturing, typically takes more preparation time (Miller et al., 2000; Hanson and Moser, 2003; Pundak and Rozner, 2008). Thus, not only will the actual process of change take more time, but we are asking faculty to shift to a method that might be, by its very nature, more time-consuming. Institutional recognition of this fact, and corresponding allowance in faculty schedules, will thus be critical to accomplishing widespread adoption of evidence-based teaching strategies. In addition, for such changes to be made, there needs to be an incentive for faculty to modify their pedagogical approach; even though time is necessary, time alone is likely not sufficient for widespread change to occur. Incentives likely drive most of our professional decisions, and teaching is no exception. If we as faculty are indeed provided the requisite training and time to enact changes in our teaching, then there must also be a concomitant reason why we should want to change. Research has demonstrated that even if faculty are interested in changing their pedagogical approach, few incentives are available to spur this action (Hativa, 1995; Walczyk and Ramsey, 2003; Gibbs and Coffey, 2004; Weiss et al., 2004; Wilson, 2010; Anderson et al., 2011). Many argue that if change takes time and training, then faculty need to be compensated for their efforts in the form of lower teaching loads, financial benefits, recognition for tenure, teaching awards, or even, at the most basic level, verbal acknowledgment from colleagues and supervisors. Research has shown that in many universities there are few to no rewards for teaching in novel ways or introducing evidence-based strategies (Kember and McKay, 1996; Frayer, 1999; Krockover et al., 2002; Romano et al., 2004). In fact, there are some reports that change in instruction can lead to poor teaching evaluations, due to student resistance to change, which can negatively affect progression to tenure (Anderson, 2002, 2007). Until universities reward teaching as much as research (Hannan, 2005; Porter et al., 2006) or find ways to better integrate teaching and research (Kloser et al., 2011), the pressure is on faculty, in particular pretenure faculty, to spend the majority of their time on research, sometimes at the expense of high-quality teaching or any attention to the constant calls for change in teaching practice. The needs for training, time, and incentives are the most commonly cited impediments to widespread change in undergraduate biology faculty teaching practice, and indeed these are real and present barriers. However, let us pause. Imagine a university that provides faculty with all the training, all the time, and all the incentives faculty needed—would that be enough for all biology faculty or even the majority of biology faculty to adopt or build on pedagogical reform? While these “big three” factors are likely necessary for change to occur, it is far from clear that they are sufficient for it to happen. Focusing our efforts exclusively on training, time, and incentives ignores at least one additional and potentially key barrier to faculty change that is largely absent from change discussions: the role of a scientist's professional identity. INTRODUCING THE CONCEPT OF A SCIENTIST'S PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY The process by which we become scientists is often so long and arduous that few of us may have actually taken the time to reflect what constitutes our professional identities as scientists. In the midst of mastering laboratory techniques and crafting research grants, we are also learning, often subconsciously and implicitly, what professional norms we need to obey, or at least tolerate, to be perceived as successful academic scientists. Identity is most often thought about in the social sciences in terms of personal identity or how a person thinks of himself or herself in the context of society. Based on the ideas of Mead (1934) and Erikson (1968), identity is not a stagnant property, but rather an entity that changes with time, often going through stages, and is continuously modified based on the surrounding environment. It has been described as “being recognized as a certain kind of person in a given context” (Gee, 2001, p. 99). For the purposes of this article, we consider scientists’ professional identities to be how they view themselves and their work in the context of their disciplines and how they accrue status among their professional colleagues as academic scientists. These aspects are heavily influenced by the training specific to academic scientists, including course work, laboratory experiences, and the everyday culture and rewards of the scientific profession. Peer acceptance, or more formally the process of peer review, is also closely tied to the development of a professional identity in the sciences. Both the publication of the research we accomplish and garnering the resources we need for experimental work, either at our institution or from national funding agencies, are generally dependent on positive peer review and a shared professional identity with these peers. Thus, the development of a professional identity is not unlike the development of a personal identity but is situated in the context of a discipline and thus framed by the “rules of membership” of that discipline. If you are an academic scientist, then it is likely you were either explicitly told the rules of academic science, or you were able to somehow infer them and make choices to fit in or at least make others think that you fit in. Frustratingly, these rules of professional membership are not always obvious or intuitive, sometimes inadvertently keeping out those who are not afforded opportunities to learn the rules, expectations, and currencies of status within a particular discipline. This has been previously documented as a pivotal problem in the sciences, in particular in attracting and retaining women and people of color in the field (Carlone and Johnson, 2007; Johnson, 2007). While a professional identity is by definition an internalized identity, it guides our external actions and decisions in our profession, including the decisions we make about how we teach. If a scientist has a professional identity that does not encompass teaching at all, or if a scientist has a professional identity he or she feels could be put at risk in his or her discipline and among his or her peers by embracing innovative approaches to teaching, then professional identity becomes a critical barrier in efforts to promote widespread change in undergraduate biology education. WHAT ARE THE TENSION POINTS BETWEEN MAINTAINING ONE'S SCIENTIFIC PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY AND PARTICIPATING IN PEDAGOGICAL CHANGE? Several lines of inquiry support why a scientist's professional identity might interfere with his or her willingness to participate in pedagogical change. We describe here three tension points that individual faculty may commonly encounter when deciding whether or not to participate in biology education change efforts: 1) training cultivates a primarily research identity and not a teaching identity, 2) scientists are afraid to “come out” as teachers, and 3) the professional culture of science considers teaching to be lower status than research and positions scientists to have to choose between research and teaching. Each of these tension points, along with research literature that explores its origins, is presented below. TRAINING CULTIVATES PRIMARILY A RESEARCH IDENTITY AND NOT A TEACHING IDENTITY The first tension point between professional identity and pedagogical change efforts is that scientists are trained in an atmosphere that defines their professional identities primarily as research identities to the exclusion of teaching identities. A scientist's professional identity is shaped by a number of factors, but this socialization into the discipline of science often begins in graduate school (Austin, 2002). For undergraduates who spend considerable time in research labs for summer research projects or honors theses, socialization may begin earlier. However, graduate school is when all future scientists formally enter a learning period about the scientific profession and the cultural norms of the profession, often leading aspiring young scientists to adopt the values, attitudes, and professional identities of the scientists who trained them. Graduate school is the shared playground, where scientists learn the culture and values of the field, as well as how to play the game of professional science. Over the past 30 yr, doctoral and postdoctoral training at research institutions has put a tremendous emphasis on research, immersing students in the culture of research for a scientific discipline, while often ignoring teaching (Fairweather et al., 1996; Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, 2002). While some time spent as a teaching assistant may be required, in general there is no requirement for evidence of developing competency in teaching. Consequently, it has been asserted that there is a profound disconnect between the training that students are receiving in doctoral programs and the careers that many of these students will ultimately enter (Tilghman, 1998; Golde and Dore, 2001; Austin, 2002; Dillenburg, 2005; Dillenburg and Connolly, 2005; Fuhrmann et al., 2011). Faculty positions at most colleges and universities are primarily teaching positions, and even faculty positions at research institutions require some teaching, but the majority of graduate students in the sciences are only taught how to do research. What support is given to those graduate students who are interested in developing teaching skills in graduate school? A growing number of institutions have graduate student and faculty teacher-training programs (Rushin et al., 1997; Austin et al., 2008; Ebert-May et al., 2011). However, despite recommendations for the implementation of pedagogy-focused training in graduate school, programs focused on innovative teaching strategies are often voluntary and serve only a small percentage of the overall population of graduate students. Currently, there are no federal mandates associated with training grants that would require pedagogical training for future scientists. As a result, most graduate students still learn how to teach through an “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie, 1975; Borg, 2004). They model their own teaching approaches after their professors. Students without explicit training tend to teach “naively” (Cross, 1990), often relying on inaccurate assumptions about teaching and learning. Most college classes in the sciences are taught in the traditional lecture format, so the majority of beginning science instructors equate teaching with lecturing, both linguistically and conceptually (Mazur, 2009). Without explicit training during graduate school, postdoctoral training experiences, or even early faculty years, these inaccurate assumptions about teaching appear to persist and become solidified. Additionally, even if a scientific trainee or early-career faculty member is interested in adopting pedagogical approaches different than the norm, there may be peer pressure from scientific colleagues to conform to traditional methods of teaching (Van Driel et al., 1997; Gibbs and Coffey, 2004). Not only is teaching not a formal or recommended component of postdoctoral training, some faculty advisors even view teaching as completely ancillary to, and a distraction from, the training that postdoctoral scholars need, ostensibly to become professors. The National Institutes of Health's Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards (NIH IRACDA) postdoctoral program is a notable exception to this. IRACDA postdoctoral fellows conduct research in basic science at R1 institutions and concurrently have formal, mentored teaching experiences at minority-serving institutions (IRACDA, 2012); however, IRACDA currently serves only a limited number of postdocs. Additionally, the FIRST IV program also seeks to provide postdoctoral fellows with training and mentored teaching experiences as they transition to faculty roles, but again, this is an option for a limited number of postdocs (FIRST IV, 2012). Both of these programs could serve as models for the more widespread integration of teaching and research into the scientific training and professional identity development of postdoctoral fellows. If scientists do not consider teaching part of their professional identities, then how can we expect them to change their own teaching and, even more importantly, support and encourage others to change as well? SCIENTISTS ARE AFRAID TO “COME OUT” AS TEACHERS A second tension point between maintaining one's professional identity and participating in pedagogical change is that embracing a teaching identity as part of one's scientific professional identity can be perceived as a liability and something to be hidden. Mark Connolly and colleagues have documented that some graduate students who are interested in teaching are afraid to “come out” as teachers (Connolly, 2010). They fear that they will be marginalized and discriminated against by their scientific peers and mentors. Some faculty advise graduate students to hide their interest in teaching; these mentors worry that the rest of academia will not take such students seriously as researchers (Connolly, 2010). There have been reports that some research professors, upon learning their graduate students are interested in teaching, no longer spend the same amount of time mentoring them. Significantly, some doctoral students have faculty advisors who do not allow them to engage in any activities outside laboratory work (Wulff et al., 2004). Some advisors are of the mentality that graduate students should always be at the bench and that any time devoted to teaching negatively affects research, despite a recent study indicating that teaching while doing research might improve research skills (Feldon et al., 2011). Unfortunately, this approach leaves students with both a skill set and perspective on science that is very narrowly focused. Postdoctoral scholars often face similar problems but often without the larger support structure that many graduate students have. Because postdocs tend to be fairly isolated in individual labs, they are even more dependent on their research mentors for guidance about career paths. If graduate students and postdoctoral scholars fear the ramifications of admitting that teaching is part of their identity, an interest in teaching can be internalized as something illicit, to be kept hidden from peers and mentors. Even those who are interested in continuing in academia to become professors are encouraged to limit the amount of teaching they do. This implicit, if not explicit, research-centric norm of graduate school can result in a student's internal conflict between developing a professional identity as a research scientist and a desire to also develop part of a professional identity as a teacher. As students struggle to reconcile these aspirations, they can fall prey to believing that teaching is inherently inferior to research and that if they are to succeed in the academic world of science, they should focus exclusively on research. For a graduate student with a strong interest in teaching, this could even result in doubts about his or her ability as a scientist. In the process of embracing a teaching identity, budding scientists potentially risk their status as researchers, as well as their professional identities, status, and even membership within the scientific community. THE PROFESSIONAL CULTURE OF SCIENCE CONSIDERS TEACHING TO BE LOWER STATUS THAN RESEARCH AND POSITIONS SCIENTISTS TO HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN RESEARCH AND TEACHING Finally, a third tension point between maintaining one's professional identity and participating in pedagogical change is that teaching is often regarded as lower status than research in the scientific disciplines (Beath et al., 2012). A large part of this disparity in status originates from the culture of individual laboratories, departments, institutions, and even the discipline as a whole (Cox, 1995; Quinlan and Akerlind, 2000; Marbach-Ad et al., 2007). However, it is also reinforced by the general salary and status structures with regard to teaching within our society, in which teaching is generally considered to be not as well compensated for or afforded as much respect as many other professions. Faculty members who want to be perceived as successful and “real” scientists may have purposely avoided integrating teaching into their professional identities, because they feel it could undermine their scientific status with their colleagues, their departments, and their institutions. These actions might even be subconscious, a natural result of years of being surrounded by other faculty who view research as superior to teaching and hearing the age-old adage “those who can, do; those who can't, teach.” This contributes to a professional identity that deemphasizes teaching specifically to maintain high professional status, both within the confines of the institution and within the larger context of the discipline. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the community of science itself does not generally assume that a research identity and a teaching identity can coexist within the same individual. Unfortunately, participation in teaching or research is often seen as a choice, as a set of alternatives rather than an integrated whole. A recent finding from the Longitudinal Study of STEM Scholars (Connolly, 2012) concluded that graduate students are interested in pursuing careers that involve teaching. However, when this finding was reported more widely, it was misinterpreted to mean that these students did not want to do research. Quite the contrary, these students were expressing an increased interest in teaching that was independent of their commitment to or interest in research (M. Connolly, personal communication). Similarly, a recent publication in PLoS One also reinforced this tension point through a survey asking graduate students to rate the attractiveness of certain career paths and gave the choices of “a faculty career with an emphasis on teaching” and “a faculty career with an emphasis on research” with no option for “a faculty career that involves equal amounts of teaching and research,” thereby, likely unknowingly, setting up the mutually exclusive choice between teaching and research (Sauermann and Roach, 2012). Many scientific trainees and current faculty may want careers that involve a balance of both, and the perception that they need to choose one or the other makes it even harder for them to adopt teaching identities without feeling they must sacrifice their research identities, which are likely their primary source of professional status. Unfortunately, in the professional culture of science, an emphasis on teaching in one's professional career can often be mischaracterized as a choice made because one either cannot do research or does not want to do research. BRINGING PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY TO THE FOREFRONT OF CHANGE DISCUSSIONS: SHIFTING FROM AN INSTITUTIONAL DEFICIT MODEL TO A DISCIPLINE DEFICIT MODEL Given the tension points described above, professional identity may not be just one additional barrier to faculty pedagogical change; it could be hypothesized to be a key underlying reason why change strategies addressing training, time, and incentives have to date had only limited success in engaging broad groups of faculty in widespread biology education reform. If biology faculty are potentially entrenched in a professional identity grounded in a research identity to the exclusion of a teaching identity, then it would behoove us, as a community, to consider the possibility that professional identity could undercut all our efforts centered on the “big three” change strategies. As a scientist grounded in a research identity, one may view pedagogical training with skepticism, considering it to be a waste of time and effort, in particular if the training tries to promote teaching methods that depart from the cultural teaching norm in science: lecturing. In addition, it follows that extra time might not be the answer to promoting faculty change, if tensions with professional identity are at play. If we have extra time in the day, we may more likely spend that time on research activities that raise our status with professional colleagues and are aligned with our professional identities. Finally, tensions between a professional scientific identity and teaching reform may, unfortunately, trivialize any teaching incentives that are developed. If scientists have professional identities that are predominantly research identities, then a Nature report or Science article will always be viewed as higher status than a departmental, university-wide, or even a national teaching award. Giving incentives for teaching will likely only have positive effects if we, as a scientific community, somehow begin to value those incentives to the same degree as research-based incentives. A common approach when we think about the reasons why faculty might not change the way they teach is to raise questions about the culture of individual institutions. We assume that the department or institution does not offer training opportunities, release time to develop new courses, or incentives for teaching in scientific ways. This could be broadly classified as an “institutional deficit model,” in which the institution lacks what is needed for reform. Certainly such problems can be inhibiting, and where they exist, institutional reform may be necessary to promote widespread involvement of faculty in pedagogical change. Many of the current pedagogical change strategies and frameworks operate within this model (Henderson et al., 2010, 2011). However, if we approach the issue of faculty change through the lens of professional identity, we will also want to consider a “discipline deficit model.” Faculty are not only members of their campuses, but also of their national professional societies and the professional community of scholars working in their particular fields. Perhaps it is not only a matter of institutions needing to provide training, time, and incentives, but also a need for a disciplinary culture shift, such that there are both a sufficient level of status attached to teaching and a critical mass of individuals who have professional identities that include teaching. Some might argue that regardless of what institutions offer, most faculty will not change the way they teach, because they view teaching as accessory to their professional identities, derived not from their institutions, but rather from their disciplines, which are cross-institutional. Finally, there is clearly a need for much more empirical research on all the potential barriers to faculty pedagogical change, but especially on the role of professional identity in determining whether a scientist chooses to participate in biology education reform efforts. Would efforts to broaden the professional identities of scientists to include teaching accelerate pedagogical change? To what extent do graduate or postdoctoral pedagogical training programs alter the professional identities of these early-career scientists? What are the long-term impacts of programs such as FIRST IV, NIH's IRACDA, or the HHMI/NAS Summer Institutes, in particular in terms of whether participants are more or less likely to engage in pedagogical reform compared with others? How would biologists—with a range of involvement in teaching and biology education reform efforts—themselves describe their professional identities and how these identities shape their professional choices and aspirations? LOOKING FORWARD: HOW COULD WE ALTER OUR PROFESSIONAL IDENTITIES TO BE MORE INCLUSIVE OF TEACHING? To achieve widespread pedagogical change toward more iterative and evidence-based approaches, it appears that we need to find ways to challenge the assumption that a scientist's professional identity should be primarily research-focused and consider ways in which teaching could become more integrated into the fabric of the discipline. Three possible areas for action are explored below. First, one place to start would be to broaden the goals and content of doctoral and postdoctoral training. Instead of having a handful of unstructured teaching requirements, students could be enrolled in training programs specifically designed to give them mentorship and support to teach in scientific ways. Specific faculty could be identified as teaching mentors for graduate students, who in turn could be given increased teaching opportunities and responsibilities as they progressed through the program. An important caveat is that these teaching mentors would themselves need to be properly trained in scientific teaching. In addition to excellence in research, excellence in teaching would also be an expected outcome of graduate education. One could envision a requirement in which dissertations included a chapter that provided evidence of scholarship and achievement in teaching. Those agencies and foundations that fund graduate education in the life sciences could take the lead in requiring such pedagogical training and deep experiences with teaching for the graduate students they support. By better integrating teaching within the current structure of scientific training, one could provide the next generation of scientists with a better foundation and skill set and also foster a teaching identity as part of their professional identities. A second way to better align professional identity with the goals of widespread pedagogical change may be to target the place where many faculty derive and maintain their professional identities: scientific journals. Publication and peer review in these journals is an important aspect of professional identity. Some scientific journals are beginning to include education sections, but these are often commentary, rather than research articles. An exception to this is Science magazine, in which a number of education articles have appeared as research reports over the past few years. By including articles about scholarly teaching and education research, scientific journals can influence scientists to view scientific teaching as a part of their professional activities. Notably, a number of scholarly journals that maintain high standards of peer review and national/international distribution have been developed in recent years that provide biologists with a venue for publication of their pedagogical research. CBE—Life Science Education, supported by the American Society for Cell Biology and the HHMI, is a good example of growth in this area. There has been a recent push to integrate peer-reviewed education articles from journals such as CBE-LSE into the tables of contents of scientific journals of professional societies, to provide more faculty easier access to education articles most relevant to their fields. This may enable scientists to view education articles and often by association, teaching, as important characteristics of their professional identities. Third, a key venue in which scientists construct and maintain their professional identities is at scientific professional meetings. These meetings were generally founded with a research focus, but many professional societies now have education sections within their annual meetings. Unfortunately, these are often not well integrated into the rest of the scientific meeting—sometimes entailing additional costs and being located in different venues and held on different days—reinforcing the concept that the education meeting is distinct from the research meeting. In addition, how are education research findings presented at these conferences? Ironically, the oral presentations are almost always presented as lectures, even when the topic of the talk is about how lecturing is not very effective! This illustrates how prevalent and influential the assumptions are about the expected norms of behavior and interaction at a scientific conference. Even biologists who have strong teaching identities and are well aware of more effective ways to present findings choose, for whatever reason (professional culture? professional identity?), not to employ evidence-based teaching and communication methods in the venue of a scientific conference. And while workshops and poster sessions would allow a higher level of interaction and dialogue—both generally more effective means of conveying information than oral presentations—these venues are often perceived as less important, lower status, and less stringent for high-quality data in the culture of scientific conferences. IN CONCLUSION… The challenge of addressing tensions between professional identity and pedagogical reform is a complicated issue. Importantly, we need to keep in mind that we as scientists ourselves are the ones responsible for the current state of our professional identities. We as academic scientists set up the tenure structure, publication requirements, and training requirements and dictate the group norms and expected modes of interaction in our own disciplines. We have created and contributed to a culture of science in which research generally has higher status than teaching. Some faculty continue to perpetuate the myth that a researcher should not want to teach and broadcast that value judgment to new graduate students, who are trying to forge their way as scientists. But we, as a professional community, also have the opportunity to take steps to broaden our professional identities and in doing so, address a potentially critical barrier in achieving widespread biology education reform.

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Making a Difference in Science Education: The Impact of Undergraduate Research Programs.

M Eagan, Sylvia Hurtado, Mitchell J Chang … (2013)

To increase the numbers of underrepresented racial minority students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), federal and private agencies have allocated significant funding to undergraduate research programs, which have been shown to students' intentions of enrolling in graduate or professional school. Analyzing a longitudinal sample of 4,152 aspiring STEM majors who completed the 2004 Freshman Survey and 2008 College Senior Survey, this study utilizes multinomial hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) and propensity score matching techniques to examine how participation in undergraduate research affects STEM students' intentions to enroll in STEM and non-STEM graduate and professional programs. Findings indicate that participation in an undergraduate research program significantly improved students' probability of indicating plans to enroll in a STEM graduate program.

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Graham Hatfull: Role: Monitoring Editor

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Journal ID (nlm-ta): CBE Life Sci Educ

Journal ID (hwp): CBE-LSE

Journal ID (pmc): CBE-LSE

Journal ID (publisher-id): CBE-LSE

Title: CBE Life Sciences Education

Publisher: American Society for Cell Biology

ISSN (Print): 1931-7913

ISSN (Electronic): 1931-7913

Publication date (Print): Winter 2014

Volume: 13

Issue: 4

Pages: 602-606

Affiliations

[1]*Bellevue College, Bellevue, WA 98007

[2] ^‡School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287

Author notes

Address correspondence to: Gita Bangera ( gita.bangera@ 123456bellevuecollege.edu ).

Article

Publisher ID: CBE-14-06-0099

DOI: 10.1187/cbe.14-06-0099

PMC ID: 4255347

PubMed ID: 25452483

SO-VID: 39126eae-737d-4d16-a902-c30eb9110acd

Copyright © © 2014 G. Bangera and S. E. Brownell. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2014 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommer-cial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

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“ASCB®” and “The American Society for Cell Biology®” are registered trademarks of The American Society of Cell Biology.

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Date received : 14 June 2014

Date revision received : 27 August 2014

Date accepted : 27 August 2014

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Education

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Education

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Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Can Make Scientific Research More Inclusive

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Assessment of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences: A Meeting Report

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Making a Difference in Science Education: The Impact of Undergraduate Research Programs.

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