While the majority of published accounts of CUREs are for smaller, upper-level courses, the recent Howard Hughes Medical Institute university competition specifically called for efforts to broaden the participation of students in research in their introductory years, so we expect to see a greater number of high-enrollment introductory CUREs in the coming years.
Introductory-level CUREs that are a required part of the curriculum are an ideal model for this, giving all students a more equitable experience in authentic research and providing tools and knowledge about research that can be transferable to other internships.
In fact, for CUREs to ameliorate the inequities present in a student's first experience with research, it is necessary to make these CUREs required introductory courses in which all students must participate.
Is the survey useful for measuring a variety of CUREs in different settings, such as CUREs for majors or nonmajors, or CUREs at an introductory or advanced levels?
Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) may be a more inclusive entry point to scientific research than independent research experiences, and the implementation of CUREs at the introductory level may therefore be a way to improve the diversity of the scientific community.
Will Walker, in his introductory post, writes that he never cured cancer or built a spaceship, but he is trying to capture a university's attention.
If CUREs were made required introductory courses, they would help reduce the factors that contribute to inequities and give all students the opportunity to engage in authentic research.
We developed a CURE that replaced our "cookbook" introductory biology course; it is required of all undergraduate biology majors and is not directly related to any faculty member's research at this institution.
The SUR knowledge assessment was designed to assess understanding of introductory biology topics that are targeted by this CURE (e.g., cell cycle, mutation, cancer, green fluorescent protein; Figure S3).
Recently, Stanford University redesigned its introductory biology lab courses to convert them to CUREs that are required for all biology majors, with class sizes scaling up to more than 250 students, indicating that it is possible to do this as a required course on a large scale (Brownell et al., 2013).
