Project: Malate Dehydrogenase CURE Community

Project Goals:
The first goal will fill a CUREs gap by creating self-supporting and sustainable protein-centric
CUREs. The second goal will use this protein-centric CUREs community to examine two critical
aspects of a CURE: 1) the impact of the length of CUREs (course long CUREs (cCUREs) or shorter, modular
CUREs (mCUREs)), and 2) the role of research collaborations across courses or institutions to
assess their importance for student learning, retention and motivation. Student and Faculty outcomes will
be assessed using validated assessment tools and an outside evaluator working with both an internal
advisory team and an external advisory board as well as the participants.
Participants:
Twenty-two faculty from 19 institutions that were a part of the MCC participated in this research project. Approximately 1,500 of their students participated in this project. Students were involved in courses from introductory to advanced biology, chemistry, and biochemistry. Participant institutions included public and private community colleges, primarily undergraduate institutions, and research institutions.
Methods:
There were five conditions: control (not CURE), part of a semester CURE (mCURE), full semester CURE (cCURE), independent cCURE, and collaborative CURE (students collaborated with a faculty member outside of the institution). Students were given surveys pre and post semester including the (1) The Laboratory Course Assessment Survey (LCAS: Corwin LA, Runyon C, Robinson A, Dolan EL. The laboratory course assessment survey: a tool to measure three dimensions of research-course design. CBE— Life Sciences Education. 2015;14(4): ar37), (2) Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS: Gormally C, Brickman P, Lutz M. Developing a Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS): measuring undergraduates’ evaluation of scientific information and arguments. CBE- Life Sciences Education. 2012;11(4): 364-377), (3) Experimental Design Ability Test (EDAT: Sirum K, Humburg J. The Experimental Design Ability Test (EDAT). Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching. 2011;37(1): 8-16) (4) Student CURE survey (Lopatto D, Alvarez C, Barnard D, Chandrasekaran C, Chung J, Du C, et al. Education Forum: Genomics Education Partnership. Science. 2008;322: 684-685), (5) the STEM Career Interest Scale (Tyler-Wood T, Knezek G, Christensen R. Instruments for assessing interest in STEM content and careers. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. 2010;18(2): 345-368), and (5) Institutional data request for STEM enrollment, graduation, demographics, and GPA. Faculty data from the Faculty CURE survey (Lopatto D, Alvarez C, Barnard D, Chandrasekaran C, Chung J, Du C, et al. Education Forum: Genomics Education Partnership. Science. 2008;322: 684-685) and elements of a CURE as defined by the grant were given to the faculty post-semester. Faculty surveys are available from the appendices of the attached manuscripts.
Analysis:
For pre-post tests ANOCVAs with the co-variate and an interaction term between Minoritized Group (MG or URM) status was were included. For categorical data chi-squared analysis was included.