Brownell and Kloser’s article on “course-based undergraduate research experiences” or CUREs discusses the move from cookbook labs to labs that engage students in more authentic research that reflect the nature of real scientific research. In other words, students should engage in “knowledge-building research” in undergraduate research labs. This might just be my opinion, but thinking up “real life” research that also relates to typical undergraduate curriculum doesn’t sound like an easy task. Typical scientific research pushes the boundaries of our current knowledge, and in many undergrad bio courses, students are trying to learn the basics. Here at PSU I teach a lab in the biology introduction for bio majors that deals with a type of fungi that displays the results of meiosis (ask me if you want to know more about the fungal life cycle 😉 ). We irradiate the fungi with x-rays as part of the lab. We tell the students that they are participating in “real research” because we don’t exactly know what crossover frequencies they are going to get– but we do know the basics of what “should happen”. Would this count as the type of CURE the authors are advocating for, or does the end result have to be even more open-ended? I’d like to hear what others think of this question. The authors later state: “The goals of undergraduate science education include not just the acquisition of content knowledge, but also the opportunity for students to successfully engage in the practices and processes of science. Developing future scientists requires opportunities for students to engage in epistemic elements of science…” (Brownell & Kloser, 2015). This quote uses many of the situative words from our word list, and the idea of CUREs as allowing students to participate in authentic research reminds me of our discussion of legitimate peripheral participation.
In Hofstein and Lunetta’s paper on science ed in the 21st century, the section on social interactions in college laboratory settings resonated with me. The authors explain that the lab setting is a place for “students and their teachers engage in collaborative inquiry and to function as a classroom community of scientists” and that labs can foster “collaborative social relationships” (Hofstein and Lunetta, 2004). To me, so much of the lab experience in undergrad hinges on the social interactions in the lab– i.e. how the teacher interacts with students and fosters group collaboration. If a lab lacks a TA/instructor/teacher that is not good at this, the entire lab experience suffers. Many times an undergrad lab instructor is a PhD student who is required to teach to get their assistantship, and otherwise couldn’t care less about teaching. To be honest, I’ve got no idea about how to fix this issue. Combating this problem might be an impossible task, but I’d like to hear what others think of this idea.
Finally, the article on undergrad chem labs is very different than the types of papers we’ve read thus far. In the conclusion, the authors state: “For students who viewed the procedure as simple and straightforward to carry out resulting in a loss of autonomy, they overlooked the opportunity to consider the chemistry that afforded such simplicity in order to just adhere strictly to the procedure. For students who felt confident and familiar being in the laboratory, they, too, overlooked such an opportunity. Both of these groups of students made a conscious choice not to actively participate in learning in their laboratory courses” (Galloway et al, 2016, p. 235). Yikes! I get annoyed by undergrad science majors as much as the next guy, but this seems unfair. I don’t think the authors should assume the students are actively ignoring the chemistry and trying not to learn– maybe their instruction should be re-evaluated!
Brownell, S. E., & Kloser, M. J. (2015). Toward a conceptual framework for measuring the effectiveness of course-based undergraduate research experiences in undergraduate biology. Studies in Higher Education, 40(3), 525–544. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1004234
Hofstein, A., & Lunetta, V. N. (2004). The Laboratory in Science Education: Foundations for the Twenty-First Century. Science Education, 88(1), 28–54. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.10106
Galloway, K. R., Malakpa, Z., & Bretz, S. L. (2016). Investigating Affective Experiences in the Undergraduate Chemistry Laboratory: Students’ Perceptions of Control and Responsibility. Journal of Chemical Education, 93(2), 227–238. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00737
Hi Sarah,
The kind of experience that you describe as happening in the labs here at Penn State do seem to tick some of the CURE checkboxes and it is an interesting point you bring up about how open-ended the exercise should be. I can’t speak for the authors but I think that they would advocate for leaving it open ended as the entire premise is on a situative experinece for students as they go through a research experience and a large part of that is in determining the trajectory of the experiment. Although they don’t explicitly state it as such, I think your perception of this as a form of legitimate peripheral participation is fairly accurate. With CURE, the focus is on a situative positioning of students in authentic scientific practice. That being said, there is a an interesting debate to be had about the degree of open-endedness that is to be provided to the experiment and to the degree of scaffolding that must be provided to undergraduate who are complete novices. That brings up interesting nuances that we can talk about in class.
Your concern with the quality of scaffolding that can be provided by a lab assistant (who usually happens to be a PhD or grad student) is quite apt. It’s something that has been bothering me with almost all of the learning theories we have considered so far, as they seem to place a really heavy burden on the instructor.
I must admit, Galloway’s criticism of undergrads did strike me as particularly jarring, but I think there is a certain element of truth to the statement (if you ignore the snarkiness). Very often, we do find undergraduate students who view the traditional ‘cookbook’ laboratory as a mere hurdle to get over without being overly interested or concerned with the content. I certainly have been guilty in the past of shortcutting my way through lab courses just to get through. That being said, I think Galloway’s criticism is more of an indictment of traditional laboratories than of students (although it certainly doesn’t seem to be intended that way). It’ll be interesting if there has been a study of student affective responses in a lab that was designed with the principles of CURE in mind (we couldn’t find any during our literature search). I think those should show more positive results for student engagement.
Sarah, after reading your post and re-looking at some of my own notes on the readings, I started to think about science labs in K-12 education. While I know that this week’s readings focus more on labs at the collegiate level than in K-12 education – Brownell and Kloser (2015) and Galloway et al. (2016) specifically focus their articles on college labs while Hofstein and Lunetta (2002) look at science labs in general and do not focus on one educational level – many of us are studying to be future K-12 science teachers, so I am curious to know how the readings can be applied to that context. For example, you mention that science labs try to teach the basics, try to provide hands-on activities to students that are ‘authentic’, and try to include collaborative aspects, but I am curious to know how these ideas can be applied to K-12 education. Is it possible to have CURE in K-12 science classes that are already packed with content? How about providing labs to students that are truly authentic, is that feasible? Or are labs that are not fully cookbook labs but not fully authentic activities (as discussed by Brownell and Kloser) the best compromise in K-12 science classrooms? I am curious to know your, and other classmates, ideas on this.
I had a similar question about CURE. Typically when undergrads are involved in research they are on the end of doing the work rather than doing the thinking. The reason for this is that their knowledge base is not large enough yet for them to move to the more advanced thought aspect of research. So where does CURE fit into this?
Hi Sarah – I agree that CURE labs would likely be challenging to implement! I think your fungi lab may count as CURE, assuming your students develop their own procedures for determining the crossover frequencies, instead of being given step-by-step directions in a lab manual. From my understanding, I interpreted CURE as being a step beyond inquiry labs, which also would require students to come up with their own procedures and do research on the background of the topic, but would have a known solution. I think CURE would be great to implement if there is a possibility for collaboration with a research professor to help generate lab ideas, but going for a more inquiry based lab approach generally would be more accessible.
I agree that the social interactions within labs have a big impact on the experience. My undergrad didn’t have a graduate program, so there were no TAs. I feel like my social interactions with professors were more distant than what I have experienced on the other side as a TA, and from what I’m aware of with other TAs. While a TA may not really be interested in teaching, the fact that they are a student instead of a professor makes them more approachable for students, so I think it’s a bit more common for TA-lead labs to be more generally sociable, just from what I’ve seen!
I think the Galloway paper is a great example of what DBER research looks like, although that may not exactly be a good thing. I think there is a general lack of depth in DBER research from when I was looking into papers for our week, so I would agree with Harriet’s comment that the paper was more surface level research.
Yeah, I feel you on Galloway and others (2016). The quote you cited is a remarkable comment given how they have assessed causation. From a list of words, they inferred that the students missed opportunities to learn based on their lack of connectivity to the class at either ends of the ability spectrum. Perhaps more of a consideration of the type and scope of questioning may elicit different results? I thought this paper was pretty surface level and I find their take aways largely unconvincing.