The NSF-Funded Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Project, Combining Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences with Place-based Learning to Increase Student Retention, Civic Engagement, and Self-efficacy, ran from October 2018 to September 2022. In those four years, the project team consisting of  STEM educators, STEM education researchers, ecologists, and many graduate and undergraduate students accomplished many goals in line with the projects? broad aims to 1) design and implement ?power-of-place? course-based undergraduate research experiences (PoP-CUREs) in which students would engage with the community and elements of their local environment to conduct locally impactful research, 2) engage the community collaboratively with university supported ecological research with potential for positive local impacts, 3) assess the efficacy of our PoP-CUREs, 4) ensure the sustainability of PoP-CUREs at CU Boulder, and 5) disseminate our PoP-CURE model. 

This project broadly aimed to advance knowledge and innovate in the area of STEM (specifically Biology) education by proposing and testing a new CURE model. We combined prior research done on CUREs that indicated which instructional elements are necessary for CUREs to have positive impacts on student learning with both theory and empirical work done on community-engaged research and place-based instruction. Using these frameworks as guides, we designed a learning experience that is a) research focused, b) place-based, d) interdisciplinary, and c) collaborative. Our learning experiences leveraged the Boulder Apple Tree Project, a project dedicated to the preservation of unique historic apple cultivars via grafting of historic trees, surveying tree health and disease distributions, and developing a better understanding of the ecosystem services offered by orchards. In collaboration with this project, students in our courses and summer bridge experiences worked to understand how the trees contribute to local communities and to discover how we can best preserve and care for these trees for years to come. The semester-long PoP-CURE courses and two-week bridge programs were successful in engaging a few hundred students from CU Boulder and Front Range Community College in this work. With three PoP-CURE iterations and two bridge iterations, we were able to make adaptations  serving to vet this new model of instruction for use in Biology courses at other 2 and 4-year institutions. 

In effort to more fully and comprehensively understand the outcomes of these experiences, our team developed a new instrument to test whether the courses were likely to contribute to students? future scientific civic engagement or their engagement with local communities to improve community well being using their science skills. We first worked to define this construct (what would predict scientific civic engagement?), researched prior instruments that measured predictors of scientific civic engagement, and then designed and tested the validity of a new instrument to predict students? scientific civic engagement. This survey, the Predictors of Scientific Civic Engagement (PSCE) Survey, is now published and broadly available for use. Furthermore, educational research using the PSCE  demonstrates that our PoP-CURE courses have potential to increase several dimensions predictive of future scientific civic engagement. 

While this project has contributed to new knowledge and advanced the understanding of how community-engaged research can improve student outcomes, its impact extends beyond this to include several important benefits to society and positive social change. As mentioned, several hundred students have participated in the PoP-CURE courses and bridge programs and benefited from the outcomes of developing research skills and engaging with local communities. In this work, we were intentional in recruiting students from underrepresented groups in STEM. Students from these groups stand to gain more from these types of research experiences than their well-represented peers. Furthermore, this project has seeded additional efforts to involve students from across the Rocky Mountain Region in apple preservation. With the support of an NSF IUSE Level 2 grant, we are now expanding engagement in PoP-CUREs to other institutions, including several community colleges and minority serving institutions across the region. The next phase of the project will broaden the impact that these courses have. Finally, our project?s main goal of increasing students? ability and confidence to engage with their communities using their scientific knowledge and skill has potential for broad and far-reaching impacts. If we do achieve our aim of increasing students? future scientific civic engagement, we may have impacts beyond the classroom within students? own communities that are an indirect result of this work. While results of future scientific civic engagement cannot easily be tracked or characterized, it is our hope that this work will contribute to the development of the next generation of civically engaged and capable scientists.

Last Modified: 01/27/2023
Modified by: Lisa A Corwin