Throwing Away the Cookbook: Implementing Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) in Chemistry

Heemstra, Jennifer M.; Waterman, Rory; Antos, John M.; Beuning, Penny J.; Bur, Scott K.; Columbus, Linda; Feig, Andrew L.; Fuller, Amelia A.; Gillmore, Jason G.; Leconte, Aaron M.; Londergan, Casey H.; Pomerantz, William C. K.; Prescher, Jennifer A.; Stanley, Levi M.

doi:10.1021/bk-2017-1248.ch003

Cited by 44 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This manuscript presents the work of high school students who have performed this work after completing BioChem-CoRe, a 7 week crash course on computational chemistry (http://biochemcore.ucsd.edu/). These results helps to illustrate the benefits and possibilities of teaching science as we do science (48, 49). By participating in structured challenges with real-world significance, students gain motivation, confidence, and both technical and soft skills.…”

Section: Pedagogical Significancementioning

confidence: 78%

Benchmarking ensemble docking methods as a scientific outreach project

Gan

Kumar²,

Chen

et al. 2020

Preprint

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The discovery of new drugs is a time consuming and expensive process. Methods such as virtual screening, which can filter out ineffective compounds from drug libraries prior to expensive experimental study, have become popular research topics. As the computational drug discovery community has grown, in order to benchmark the various advances in methodology, organizations such as the Drug Design Data Resource have begun hosting blinded grand challenges seeking to identify the best methods for ligand pose-prediction, ligand affinity ranking, and free energy calculations. Such open challenges offer a unique opportunity for researchers to partner with junior students (e.g., high school and undergraduate) to validate basic yet fundamental hypotheses considered to be uninteresting to domain experts. Here, we, a group of high school-aged students and their mentors, present the results of our participation in Grand Challenge 4 where we predicted ligand affinity rankings for the Cathepsin S protease, an important protein target for autoimmune diseases. To investigate the effect of incorporating receptor dynamics on ligand affinity rankings, we employed the Relaxed Complex Scheme, a molecular docking method paired with molecular dynamics-generated receptor conformations. We found that CatS is a difficult target for molecular docking and we explore some advanced methods such as distance-restrained docking to try to improve the correlation with experiments. This project has exemplified the capabilities of high school students when supported with a rigorous curriculum, and demonstrates the value of community-driven competitions for beginners in computational drug discovery.

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Section: Pedagogical Significancementioning

confidence: 78%

Benchmarking ensemble docking methods as a scientific outreach project

Gan

Kumar²,

Chen

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Incorporating research activities into coursework provides a powerful solution to this challenge along with many other benefits for both faculty and students. As a result, increasing numbers of faculty have been inspired to “throw away the cookbook” 12 and implement CUREs in their lab courses. Table 1 highlights selected examples of CUREs at the interface of biology and chemistry, demonstrating that this pedagogical approach is viable across different institutional contexts and can focus on a range of course themes.…”

Section: Collaborating With Undergraduate Students Through Course-basmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaborating with Undergraduates To Contribute to Biochemistry Community Resources

et al. 2017

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Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have gained traction as effective ways to expand the impact of undergraduate research while fulfilling pedagogical goals. In this Perspective, we present innovative ways to incorporate fundamental benefits and principles of CUREs into a classroom environment through information/technology-based research projects that lead to student-generated contributions to digital community resources (CoRes). These projects represent an attractive class of CUREs because they are less resource-intensive than laboratory-based CUREs, and the projects align with the expectations of today's students to create rapid and publicly accessible contributions to society. We provide a detailed discussion of two example types of CoRe projects that can be implemented in courses to impact research and education at the chemistry-biology interface: bioinformatics annotations and development of educational tools. Finally, we present current resources available for faculty interested in incorporating CUREs or CoRe projects into their pedagogical practices. In sharing these stories and resources, we hope to lower the barrier for widespread adoption of CURE and CoRe approaches and generate discussions about how to utilize the classroom experience to make a positive impact on our students and the future of the field of biochemistry.

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“…There is a common need for institutions of higher education to adapt from common modalities of instruction to high-impact pedagogical practices in order to enhance the engagement of college students in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines [1]. Traditional laboratory instruction in chemistry courses prompts all students in a classroom to complete scripted activities, where they will arrive at an already determined outcome, which fails to inspire the curiosity and creativity that leads research progress among practitioners [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Exposing students early in their post-secondary education to the processes of science offers the possibility to inspire the next generation of scientists, who are prepared to enter the workforce and to answer the big questions facing this generation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Learning Community Involving Collaborative Course-Based Research Experiences for Foundational Chemistry Laboratories

Rubush

Stone

2020

Education Sciences

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Numerous American national committees have recommended the replacement of traditional labs with a more engaging curriculum that inspires inquiry and enhances scientific skills (examples include the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)’s Engage to Excel program and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Vision and Change, among others), due to a large body of evidence that shows significant enhancements in student learning and affective outcomes. The implementation of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) is a creative way to scale up the deployment of authentic research experiences to students. Another highly regarded high-impact practice in postsecondary education is the addition of learning communities. The integration of a three-course learning community and authentic research experiences to laboratory courses adds both a community of scholarship and a development of scientific communication and process skills. This study describes a course that blends these two high-impact practices in higher education in order to promote greater post-course gains in essential elements of a CURE curriculum. This collaborative course shows large post-course gains in essential elements, such as scientific communication and working collaboratively.

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Throwing Away the Cookbook: Implementing Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) in Chemistry

Cited by 44 publications

References 22 publications

Benchmarking ensemble docking methods as a scientific outreach project

Benchmarking ensemble docking methods as a scientific outreach project

Collaborating with Undergraduates To Contribute to Biochemistry Community Resources

A Learning Community Involving Collaborative Course-Based Research Experiences for Foundational Chemistry Laboratories

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