CURE Disrupted! Takeaways from a CURE without a Wet-Lab Experience

Abstract

Due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (spring 2020), universities quickly moved to remote instruction. Our research during this time frame included investigating course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) in General Chemistry, and we found ourselves in the middle of a CURE study without any laboratory component (aka “CURE-disrupted”). While the literature surrounding the importance of CUREs is extensive, based on our literature search, we posit that this is the first report of a study demonstrating student outcomes when given the CURE offering without actually implementing the wet-lab component. Consequently, we asked “is it important for students to execute the entire research project of a CURE or to simply understand scientific reasoning and rationalization of the processes?” Herein, we report student responses as “expert-like” and “non-expert-like” data using the CLASS instrument, and we describe the qualitative results from focus groups for the participating CURE and non-CURE students. Top emergent themes from the CURE participants included: Discovery (29.91%), Understanding by Doing (23.41%), and Research Skills and Techniques (20.36%). Conversely, students in the traditional lab reported top emergent themes mostly surrounding course organization, and top emergent themes included: Required More Structure (14.69%), Research Skills and Techniques (7.3%), and Understanding by Doing (6.11%). These preliminary findings demonstrate the value of a CURE, even while disrupted. While this pandemic allowed for the unique opportunity to evaluate offering a CURE without a wet-lab-based experience, we ultimately suggest that additional studies be completed surrounding this idea, in a more controlled (nonremote) learning environment to corroborate these findings.

LAB Theory, HLAB Pedagogy, and Review of Laboratory Learning in Chemistry during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Interestingly, a report comparing the performance on the final (remote) exam between general chemistry students in a traditional lab vs in a general chemistry CURE (students self-selected into either group during course registration—both groups followed the same lab manual during remote learning) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (Omaha, NE) showed no statistically significant difference between their grades, despite the difference in their laboratory work before ERL. 133 A student’s demonstrated abilities to handle data and understand the experiment therefore appeared to be independent of their grade-based performance in several examples. Since many authors explicitly made a distinction between lab assignment grades vs the student’s struggles to complete the assignment (for example, a student might have earned a good grade but required more TA support than normal in the process), this seems like a likely explanation for the variation in reported performance comparisons.…”

“…Perhaps this suggests that early hands-on experiences are not sufficient in enacting enduring change if the experiences are not continued. 133 …”

“…Perhaps this suggests that early hands-on experiences are not sufficient in enacting enduring change if the experiences are not continued. 133 It is conceivable that these discrepancies in competency development could be partly due to student affective attitudes; perhaps students who were provided hands-on experiments were more invested in their work and so displayed greater growth than students who were obliged to stare at a computer screen. As will be discussed in the following section, there was a considerable difference in engagement on the basis of the course activities during ERL.…”

“…However, the instructors noted the students evidenced significant difficulty with building on knowledge, connecting topics, using relevant data to generate conclusions, knowing how to execute physical techniques, and incorrectly assuming that a simulated experiment was done. Interestingly, a report comparing the performance on the final (remote) exam between general chemistry students in a traditional lab vs in a general chemistry CURE (students self-selected into either group during course registrationboth groups followed the same lab manual during remote learning) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (Omaha, NE) showed no statistically significant difference between their grades, despite the difference in their laboratory work before ERL . A student’s demonstrated abilities to handle data and understand the experiment therefore appeared to be independent of their grade-based performance in several examples.…”

“…Interestingly, for the report comparing general chemistry students in a traditional lab vs a CURE at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (Omaha, NE), where the students in both groups did the same lab work while remote, there was no statistically significant differences between their pre-/post-test scores (either when compared between the two groups or when compared between the start of the semester to the end) on the CLASS-Chem survey, which assesses “expert-like thinking” in chemistry students. Perhaps this suggests that early hands-on experiences are not sufficient in enacting enduring change if the experiences are not continued …”