Chemical Education Today edited by
Association Report: CUR
Kerry Karukstis Harvey Mudd College Claremont, CA 91711
The Impact of Undergraduate Research on America’s Global Competitiveness by Kerry Karukstis
Promoting Science and Technology in the U.S. American economic strength in the 21st century will depend upon our continued ability to lead the global community in areas of science and technology. Strategies to achieve and sustain this strength have been articulated in the form of specific recommendations to federal policymakers laid out in the recent report compiled for the National Academies of Science, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future” (1). To enhance the science and technology enterprise in this country, a compelling case has been made for attracting and retaining more U.S. students into science and engineering degrees (2). Such a prospect is one of the most challenging tasks facing educators today. Yet, those of us in the undergraduate research community already believe that we have an effective mechanism for both spurring interest in science and for retaining students in technical disciplines. Participation in undergraduate research with a faculty mentor is well acknowledged as a contributor to student retention in undergraduate studies and as a valuable mechanism to direct students toward specific career paths (3, 4). As a consequence of the success of this form of pedagogy, institutions have embraced research as a valued part of an undergraduate curriculum and thereby propelled undergraduate research to national prominence as an effective educational strategy. Incorporating a “Learning through Research” Approach Educators have adopted the “learning through research” philosophy beyond just offering capstone research experiences for undergraduates. Undergraduate research is effective at engaging students and inspiring them to learn because the experience places the student in a central position in the educational process. Opportunities to infuse similar inquirybased activities and research-like experiences throughout the curriculum not only share with students the excitement of scientific discovery but also engage them in the intellectual inquiry necessary to develop innovative and productive scientists. Involving students in open-ended investigations that invite them to exert their own creativity and insight in the interpretation of data is an opportunity to ignite in them the passions and intellectual curiosity that fuel scientific discovery. These are the “hands-on” and “minds-on” activities that can reverse the well-established decline in students choosing careers in science, mathematics, and technology. Creative strategies to cultivate these “habits of mind” in our future leaders have been implemented at a wide range of institutions that serve a diverse array of students. To show-
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case and share those successful practices that enable faculty and institutions to design and implement a research-supportive undergraduate curriculum, the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) has recently released Developing and Sustaining a Research-Supportive Curriculum: A Compendium of Successful Practices (5). This new book describes transformative efforts to infuse education with the excitement of research and discovery. One of the most exciting aspects of this volume is the clear demonstration that a “research-supportive” curriculum can be established in many different ways. The compendium outlines strategies that range from suggestions that faculty can implement immediately in a single class period or with a particular course assignment to more extensive initiatives that an entire campus may undertake to develop an institutional research culture. Launch of the Publication at the National Press Club In conjunction with the book release, CUR convened a panel of experts at the National Press Club in Washington, DC (6), to discuss how the nation’s competitiveness goals can be advanced by enriching the educational focus for students and teachers in the critical fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics with a research-supportive curriculum. Panelists provided student, faculty, and industry perspectives and included Lori Bettison-Varga (Associate Dean, College of Wooster and President of CUR); Kerry Karukstis (chemistry professor at Harvey Mudd College and CUR President-elect); Timothy Elgren (chemistry professor at Hamilton College and a past president of CUR); Chris Hollinsed (Director of the ACS Petroleum Research Fund); and Kateri Whitebean (a neuroscience student at Hamilton College).
Members of the panel at the National Press Club where they announced the publication of Developing and Sustaining a ResearchSupportive Curriculum. From left to right, Timothy Elgren, Chris Hollinsed, Kateri Whitebean, Kerry Karukstis, and Lori BettisonVarga.
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Chemical Education Today
At the National Press Club event, panelists emphasized that America’s competitiveness in the global economy is dependent upon the intersection of the nation’s ability to develop innovation in the business sector and the education of America’s future scientists and engineers. The editors of Developing and Sustaining a Research-Supportive Curriculum noted that the compendium highlights the importance of the collective efforts of the undergraduate community to integrate research and education. University educators across the country are working to revitalize the science curriculum on their campuses to include rigorous, hands-on experiences in the classroom so that more students will study science and choose scientific careers. By collecting and disseminating multiple examples of effective research-supportive undergraduate programs, CUR aims to encourage faculty and institutions to continue to seek creative, useful, and significant ways to promote “learning through research”. The editors further noted that the contributions to this volume represent curricular and pedagogical efforts at an array of institutions as well as in a broad distribution of disciplines. This variety in institutional and disciplinary scope was deliberate as there is much that we can learn from one another. The 34 chapters of this book describe curricular and institutional initiatives that are rooted in the process of discovery and that are effective in engaging students, enhancing their learning, developing their reasoning and critical thinking, building their research skills early in their careers, and overall strengthening the research culture on a given campus. A special feature of this book are additional “highlights” contributed by the undergraduate research community to showcase additional practices, courses, and programs that create a research-supportive undergraduate curriculum. Exemplary Practices in Research-Supportive Curricula Some of the practices, courses, and programs that create a research-supportive undergraduate curriculum that are featured in the new volume include: • Problem-based learning where an authentic problem reflecting complex, real-world situations initiates the learning process among a group of students who are engaged in a student-centered, cooperative, and interactive exploration and design of a suitable solution. • Project-based laboratories involving inquiry-driven scientific investigations that allow an individual working independently or a team of students working collaboratively to formulate the questions to be addressed and to design the experiments to answer the questions posed. • A collaboration among faculty at an array of institutions to select, develop, and field test a collection of inquiry-based experiments involving particular organisms that lend themselves to research-based experimentation at all levels of the biology curriculum. www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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…the contributions to this volume represent curricular and pedagogical efforts at an array of institutions…
• A year-long learning community of students and faculty focused on a large-scale team-based project with an emphasis on a single complex environmental/Earthsystem problem requiring a cross-disciplinary approach to address aspects of science, engineering, public policy, economics, politics, and social issues. • The use of geographic information system (GIS) technology as a teaching and learning tool to help students visualize complex spatial relationships in a variety of disciplines. • An online course design tutorial that directs faculty to set overarching and ancillary skills goals for their students and then to choose specific content through which the overarching goals can be accomplished. • Strategies for integrating activities and exercises to develop information research skills throughout a curriculum using a scaffolding approach that emphasizes iteration through multiple, sequential assignments. • The use of institutional support services to facilitate the development of research-supportive curricula including the use of writing centers and undergraduate research offices. • The use of facility design strategies to optimally encourage research activity and collaboration and facilitate the presentation and celebration of research findings. • The use of laddered teams to develop a collaborative research community, utilize the expertise and leadership skills of undergraduates, and lend a sense of continuity to projects over an extended period of time. • The design of an introductory interdisciplinary inquiry-driven laboratory designed to bridge laboratory experiences from biology, chemistry, and physics and to illustrate the commonality of investigative methods and laboratory techniques in these sciences. • The use of local natural resources—a river watershed, an environmental field station, a nature park, or arboretum—as a platform for teaching and research.
As our tagline professes, the CUR is a strong proponent of the philosophy “Learning through Research”. CUR hopes that Developing and Sustaining a Research-Supportive Curriculum will enable many more faculty members to inspire students to learn and to pursue majors in science, engineering, and mathematics.
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Association Report: CUR Literature Cited 1. Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future; Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine; The National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2007. Available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11463.html#toc (accessed Apr 2007). 2. American Competitiveness Initiative: Leading the World in Innovation; Domestic Policy Council, Office of Science and Technology Policy, February 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ stateoftheunion/2006/aci/aci06-booklet.pdf (accessed Apr 2007). 3. Enhancing Research in the Chemical Sciences at Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions: A Report from the Undergraduate Research Summit, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, August 2–4, 2003, http://abacus.bates.edu/acad/depts/chemistry/twenzel/ summit.html (accessed Apr 2007).
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4. Stewart, Joanne L. Assessment and Evaluation of the Undergraduate Research Experience. In Enhancing Research in the Chemical Sciences at Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions: A Report from the Undergraduate Research Summit, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, August 2–4, 2003; http://abacus.bates.edu/ acad/depts/chemistry/twenzel/assessment.pdf (accessed Apr 2007). 5. Developing and Sustaining a Research-Supportive Curriculum: A Compendium of Successful Practices; Karukstis, K. K.; Elgren, T. E., Eds.; Council on Undergraduate Research: Washington, DC, 2007; see http://www.cur.org/publications/comporderform.pdf and http://www.cur.org/pdf/execsum.pdf (both sites accessed Apr 2007). 6. Advancing Competitiveness Agenda by Improving Student Learning and Teaching, Council on Undergraduate Research, http:// www.cur.org/pdf/pressrelease.pdf (accessed Apr 2007).
Kerry K. Karukstis is President-elect of CUR and is a member of the Department of Chemistry, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711;
[email protected].
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