Assessment of Community-Engaged Research Experiences in Introductory General Biology Laboratories

Most introductory biology laboratories are taught using direct instruction. An alternative to the direct instruction laboratory course is the Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE). CURE courses have been reported to positively impact undergraduate students, increasing self-efficacy, enhancing science identity, improving preparation and persistence for STEM careers, and increasing inclusion of underrepresented minorities in undergraduate research. While there are several affective benefits of CUREs, our literature review reveals an absence of studies assessing pre-health students’ science identity, self-efficacy, and perceptions after participating in a community-engaged CURE laboratory. We found that students agreed that their community-engaged laboratory course had CURE design features, Discovery and Relevance had the highest rating. Overall, our results indicate that self-efficacy improved from the beginning to the end of the semester. Students in the community-engaged CURE showed gains in science identity. Understanding student affective domain is critical for improving student learning in gateway biology laboratory courses since they play very important roles in determining whether students can complete their degrees in the STEM fields. Future research should examine the relationships between self-efficacy, science identity, student perceptions of the community-engaged CURE laboratories, and gender, major, and race/ethnicity.