This report presents a summary of a meeting on assessment of course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), including an operational definition of a CURE, a summary of research on CUREs, relevant findings from studies of undergraduate research internships, and recommendations for future research on and evaluation of CUREs.

The authors review relevant literature to determine established and predicted outcomes of course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) and then use this information and social learning theory to model how students may realize desired short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes. This work has implications for future research and evaluation of CUREs.

This study shows that participation in course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) improves students’ likelihood of graduating with a STEM degree and graduating within 6 years. These results support offering CUREs in place of standard lab courses as an effective strategy for producing additional college graduates with STEM degrees.

This paper presents the development and validation of the Laboratory Course Assessment Survey (LCAS), a measure of three laboratory course design features: collaboration, discovery and relevance, and iteration. Results from analysis of LCAS data indicate that it is useful for distinguishing between research courses and traditional lab courses.

This study evaluates the reliability and validity of an instrument for quantitatively assessing project ownership in undergraduate laboratory learning experiences.

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Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide a promising avenue to attract a larger and more diverse group of students into research careers. CUREs are thought to be distinctive in offering students opportunities to make discoveries, collaborate, engage in iterative work, and develop a sense of ownership of their lab course work. Yet how these elements affect students’ intentions to pursue research-related careers remain unexplored. To address this knowledge gap, we collected data on three design features thought to be distinctive of CUREs (discovery, iteration, collaboration) and on students’ levels of ownership and career intentions from ∼800 undergraduates who had completed CURE or inquiry courses, including courses from the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI), which has a demonstrated positive effect on student retention in college and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We used structural equation modeling to test relationships among the design features and student ownership and career intentions. We found that discovery, iteration, and collaboration had small but significant effects on students’ intentions; these effects were fully mediated by student ownership. Students in FRI courses reported significantly higher levels of discovery, iteration, and ownership than students in other CUREs. FRI research courses alone had a significant effect on students’ career intentions.

Undergraduate researchers are often mentored by graduate or postdoctoral researchers who are in turn mentored by faculty, creating a “mentoring triad.” This study characterizes the prevalence of different mentoring triads at research universities and the relationships between undergraduates’ membership in specific triads and their research outcomes.