Undergraduate research experiences have been shown to enhance the educational experience and retention of college students, especially those from underrepresented populations. However, many challenges still exist relative to building community among students navigating large institutions. We developed a novel course called Entering Research that creates a learning community to support beginning undergraduate researchers and is designed to parallel the Entering Mentoring course for graduate students, postdocs, and faculty serving as mentors of undergraduate researchers. The course serves as a model that can be easily adapted for use across the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines using a readily available facilitator's manual. Course evaluations and rigorous assessment show that the Entering Research course helps students in many ways, including finding a mentor, understanding their place in a research community, and connecting their research to their course work in the biological and physical sciences. Students in the course reported statistically significant gains in their skills, knowledge, and confidence as researchers compared with a control group of students, who also were engaged in undergraduate research but not enrolled in this course. In addition, the faculty and staff members who served as facilitators of the Entering Research course described their experience as rewarding and one they would recommend to their colleagues.
We present results from a course, "Informal Science Education for Scientists: A Practicum," co-taught to graduate students in STEM-related fields by a scientist/engineer and a social scientist/humanist. This course provides a structured framework and experiential learning about informal science education during a semester-long experience.The data collected across six years of the course (11 ≤ n ≤ 16 for each) provide strong evidence that the course has been effective in encouraging graduate students in STEMrelated fields to feel more skilled at and confident with informal science education. Details are provided as to how manipulation of the course structure (i.e. making it project-based, emphasizing understanding audiences, stressing the iterative nature of design, and increasing evaluation research training) influenced the student outcomes.
Having effective interactions with public audiences about science and engineering topics is challenging. Many training workshops, boot camps, and courses have tried to address this by training professional scientists and engineers using a variety of strategies; unfortunately, the literature on the effectiveness of these approaches is sparse. We present assessment and evaluation results from a course, "Informal Science Education for Scientists: A Practicum," taught to graduate students in science and engineeringrelated disciplines in Spring 2008. This course provides a structured framework and experiential learning on informal science education for the graduate student participants during a semester-long experience. The iterative nature of designing an effective informal science education product and the importance of front-end, formative and summative evaluation are stressed throughout the course. The emphasis is placed on having students use a scientific approach in the evaluation of their product to determine if it was effective. Our results show positive outcomes related to changes in student perception of their communication skills, changes in student perceptions of audience, changes in student perception of their evaluation skills, and increased student understanding of the iterative nature of design processes.
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