Jessica, we would really love to hear about what you plan to do sophomore year and beyond. We have recently started brainstorming on this topic. Do you do classroom research experiences or engage your students in some other way? Maybe I can stop by the campus one day to discuss things and see your lab setup.

We should talk!  Our discussions have centered around statistics and data analysis skills.  Students in our program are required to take an R programming lab with their introductory stats class, and another computer programming language.  They use these skills in their upper-division biostatistics course, and we are discussing ways to incorporate them throughout the curriculum.

Danielle,

Thank you for your comment - we have worked diligently to develop this course and have been very pleased with the impact we have had on our students.

Harris-Stowe has only recently began offering STEM degrees but we are expanding rapidly. Our next target is bolstering our chemistry labs to provide high quality experiences as well. Chemistry is a challenging subject for many students, but if we could develop a course that engaged the students like we do in our biology labs I think we could find real success.

We have not investigated retention in the major just yet, but we certainly should. It will be interesting to see if there is an effect on students applying and being accepted to graduate school too. We predict this type of experience should begin their path to developing competitive resumes and applications early and give them a crucial advantage in a highly competitive process.

Whitney,

Thank you for your comment. We are currently working on a sophomore level course that will extend this experience for our biology majors and get them some proficiency with various tools of the trade and techniques. But the main way we support our students in their later years is by helping pursue internships and other opportunities. We have connections to other institutions in the area (Washington University, Saint Louis University, St. Louis Botanical Garden, St. Louis Zoo, and others) that help us get our students into research positions and further develop their career. We also have professional and peer tutors that will help students with their coursework. Additionally, we have a very successful program called the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program (MSEIP) that students can join after their freshman year. Our MSEIP students have been extremely successful pursuing opportunities.

Regarding challenges, it has been somewhat difficult to develop a curriculum that accounts for the varying levels of preparation among our students. As an open-access school we have a wide range in this regard. We have and will continue to improve, but that is the biggest problem I have observed.

I too have seen students have difficulties transitioning into college STEM majors. Its a lot to juggle, and when you are at an open-access university like ours, students are often juggling academics, work and responsibilities to their families and communities. One of the benefits I have really seen with our Bio-BOOST CURE is in the ownership aspect of designing your own project.  Students seem to take pride in their work, and this really shows during our poster-sessions.  Having the poster-sessions also adds a universal design for learning element to the course, as that this is a way independent of our written and practical exams/quizzes to demonstrate knowledge.

After students complete the course, they still have access to their TAs, who hold office hours each week in both Fall and Spring term.

For me one of the biggest challenges has been in getting the curriculum to work for a variety of instructors including adjunct instructors.  The course is cell-molecular based, and the basic curriculum was designed by a rice (O. sativa) geneticist and a worm (C. elegans) neurobiologist.  We have added additional model organisms to the curriculum including fruit flies (D. melanogaster) and Tetrahymena (T. thermophila). This is a multi-section course every semester, and it has taken some tweaking to get it to work as a consistent, coherent course for everyone....and this changes each year as our adjunct pool changes.

Thanks, these are indeed impressive resources! Dr. Horrell and I also participated in a REILbiology ( http://rcn.ableweb.org/) workshop on creating CUREs for introductory courses.

I apologize if this is a double post, I don't see the one I just wrote.....

We have students involved in two different ways.  Each lab class has an upper-division TA, who also hold their own office hours each week, in a room adjacent to our faculty office space.  Because these classes occur in our only faculty research space on campus, we also have upper-division research students who work in this space during our classes, but who are not formally part of the class.  When I teach, I will often take a moment to ask these students to talk about what they are doing right now, and how it relates to their larger research goals.  

I have seen two major benefits, one is that the intro students get to know, or at least recognize the upper-division students.  Students often work with the TAs in their office hours.  I cannot attribute this entirely to our upperdivision students, but we have seen a HUGE increase in freshman asking to do research projects.

Interesting, thanks for the response.  It seems that the freshman student's science identity improves after this experience getting to interact (or at least observe) the upper-division students conducting research.  That would be tough for us to emulate in our lab situation here at UTEP, but sounds like a great mentoring opportunity!