From Then to Now: What Learners are Still Telling us About Their CURE Experiences - Part I

This blog series is authored by USask denizens Harold Bull, Dawn Giesbrecht and Sheryl Mills. Harold is Assistant Professor Biochemistry, Microbiology & Immunology. Dawn is Laboratory Instructor Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology; Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology. Sheryl is Associate Director, Academic Programs & Interprofessional Education, USask Health Sciences.

In Post 3, From Student to Researcher (in one Term!): What learners told us about their CURE experiences, we provided direct quotes from learners. After four years of consistent, powerful, and insightful learner comments we decided to do a more fulsome study. We took the plunge and surveyed¹ CURE course graduates from our first four offerings of the course (2019-2022). One quarter (25% response rate) of all learners responded.²🎉 This blog series (within a series) (harmoniously🎵🎵) presents the data from the survey in four parts.

Part I presents data from survey questions related to skills and attitudes. Part II presents data from survey questions related to developing as a researcher. Part III presents data from survey questions related to generalizing the CURE approach to other courses. Part IV presents data from survey questions related to challenges the learners experienced in the CURE course and skills. (Note: The questions were not presented in this order on the survey. All survey respondent comments are included—no editing or cherry picking. 🍒)

Part I

Developing and practicing skills was a major goal of this course. Part I presents data from survey questions related to skills and attitudes.

1. Using a six-point Likert scale with 1 being “Not at all” and 6 being “A very major contributor”, respondents were asked the extent to which this course contributed to their development in several areas.

Table 1: The extent to which this course contributed to skill and attitude development

Comments³:

• Not just "curiosity" but applied curiosity. There isn't enough "free-flow" curiosity and or experimentation in classrooms or even in graduate research anymore. Having not just the confidence but an area to apply your confidence in a safer setting is critical before entering the work force.
• A very very important course. I would say probably one of the most educational of all my undergrad courses.
• I love the course! Even if the timeline is quite short (only 4 months) which can be hard to complete the project satisfyingly, I learned a lot from it.
• Overall, I would say that the course helped me the most in figuring out that I wanted to step away from online based research i.e. bioinformatics and lit review and try my hand at benchwork. This course is the reason that I pursued an honours project my following year.
• We weren’t able to finish/redo our project since the pandemic hit but we were able to recognize our limitations and why our experiment didn’t work the first time.

2. When asked, “Were there any skills in addition to those listed in the previous question that you think were practiced/developed in doing the CURE course?” respondents indicated the following:

• Trouble shooting or problem solving without handholding from a TA. Presentation skills from your own research and experience. Not just talking to talk from a text-book but firsthand knowledge and presenting the whole story. Not just the write-up from papers and a textbook.
• I think it is also important to have learned that science / experimenting does not always work the way it is supposed to.
• Lab-related skills (e.g. pipetting, working with instruments, transformation⁴, etc.), presentation skills (i.e. public speaking), writing skills.
• You needed to communicate with both your team members and the professors. It helped to make sure that you knew what you plan was and able to answer questions
• oral and writing skills
• Leadership skills, bio-informatics skills, scientific writing skills, and presentation skills.
• Simple lab skills
• communicating ideas to others - teammates, other classmates and professors. learning how to write a report and keep a lab book.
• Clear instructions. Research writing such proposal and reports. Preparing and presenting the research findings. Realistic.

3. In this course, all learners chose their own small research teams. On the survey we asked the extent to which they learned about teamwork through participating in this course⁵ using a scale ranging from “Not at All” (1) to “A Surprising Extent!” (6).

Table 2: The extent to which CURE course graduates learned about teamwork through participating in this course

Comments:

• We had a great team which made a huge difference to the experience of the course.

Note: For skills that CURE graduates developed and practiced in the course and ARE STILL USING, please jump to Part IV in this mini-series--within a series--Blog Post #26 of From Student to Researcher (in one Term!)

Authors’ Reflections

Our highlights 🥳

• In Table 2, the response range was from 4 to 6 and the weighted averages ranged from 5.18 to 5.36 of a possible 6!⁶
• The long-term retention of skills and attitudes developed in the CURE course.⁷
• The quality and thoughtfulness of the comments.⁸
• 25% response rate with respondents from all four years.⁹
• Harold cheered when he received attribution for Dawn’s Lego activity.¹⁰😏
• Comments that included “applied curiosity” and “realistic”.
• That this course provided a great platform for practicing and developing team management skills.
• Skills and attitudes gained seem to be durable.

What we would like to know more about 🧐

• In Table 1, the greatest range occurred regarding “Sense of belonging in the collegium”. What gives?!¹¹
• What are the opportunities in other undergraduate courses for skill development and applied curiosity with “hands-in” experimenting?
• The experiences of the CURE graduates who did not respond to the survey 🤷‍♀️(75%).¹²
• The degree to which learners appear to value these skills.

We continue this “series within a series” with Part II (developing as a researcher), Part III (generalizing the CURE approach to other courses—yup! Learners tell us it's do-able), and Part IV (skills gained and still being used, and challenges learners experienced in the CURE course).

[1] Please contact the authors for the survey.

[2] Yes, we are aware that anything over 10% response is extraordinary! And we were very pleased.

[3] These are all the comments from the survey and all the comments are direct responses. Bolding is ours.

[4] The learner is referring to genetic transformation as in introducing a plasmid into E. coli.

[5] We suspect that such high scores may be a reflection of the steep learning curve related to working as team members for the entire course. We discovered that for many learners this was their first (and often only) major team-based course. In this course, learners were guided and supported in various aspects of working as team members. Learners indicated that teamwork was not a negative experience.

[6] Go team work! 🎉

[7] We had hoped this was the case. Yay! 🥳

[8] We optimistically interpreted this as a sign of lasting engagement.

[9] We were pleased with the response rate to this cold-call survey that came out-of-the-blue using up to four-year-old contact information!

[10] Seriously, we take this as evidence of the engagement of the activity and chose to overlook the memory lapse of the respondent. This highlights our role as facilitator rather than being the centre of attention and we realized that members of the instructional team may be interchangeable. 🤣

[11]Perhaps “collegium” was a bit of an overreach...and we didn’t explain it or emphasis it during the course. 😏 Perhaps we doth protest too much...

[12] This is a challenge with any emailed survey that is “voluntary” and relies on self-selection.