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.

Both scientists and the public would benefit from improved communication of basic scientific research and from integrating scientists into education outreach, but opportunities to support these efforts are limited. We have developed two low-cost programs—"Present Your PhD Thesis to a 12-Year-Old" and "Shadow a Scientist”—that combine training in science communication with outreach to area middle schools. We assessed the outcomes of these programs and found a 2-fold benefit: scientists improve their communication skills by explaining basic science research to a general audience, and students' enthusiasm for science and their scientific knowledge are increased. Here we present details about both programs, along with our assessment of them, and discuss the feasibility of exporting these programs to other universities.

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Innovative models of teaching through research have broken the long-held paradigm that core chemistry competencies must be taught with predictable, scripted experiments. We describe here five fundamentally different, course-based undergraduate research experiences that integrate faculty research projects, accomplish ACS accreditation objectives, provide the benefits of an early research experience to students, and have resulted in publishable findings. The model detailed is the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) at The University of Texas at Austin. While there are currently 30+ active FRI research groups, or “streams”, we focus this report on five different chemistry streams in these four areas (organic, inorganic, analytical, and biochemistry) to demonstrate how general chemistry laboratory skills are taught in the context of these varied research disciplines. To illustrate the flexibility of the FRI model for teaching first-year chemistry, we show how each stream teaches students three different skills within the context of their research: making (synthesis), measuring (UV-vis spectroscopy), and characterization. As a unifying example, all five chemistry streams describe using UV–vis spectroscopy to characterize new synthetic molecules, complexes, and compounds, followed by extensive quantitative collection, processing, and analysis of experimental data sets. The FRI model allows full integration of training in mandatory and accredited general chemistry skill sets with open-ended research experiences with unexpected outcomes in undergraduate science curricula. In turn, this model enables undergraduates to be productive contributors to new knowledge and scientific discovery at the earliest levels of the undergraduate experience.

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