Undergraduate Research Experiences: a Case Study in promoting Student Engagement through Authentic Scientific Inquiry

Laboratory exercises teach practical skills that form the foundation of scientific research. These classes however, have been ineffective in promoting student engagement in science, as they are often structured around rigid and repetitive protocols. These traditional “cookbook” laboratory classes are not an accurate representation of scientific inquiry, and do not teach students the autonomy required to succeed as a professional scientist. This project directly engaged students in the discovery process by integrating Undergraduate Research Experience (URE) modules into MICR3003, a third year Microbiology course offered at the University of Queensland (UQ). As part of their undergraduate coursework, students conducted inquiry-based experiments to make novel experimental findings, and were assessed on their adherence to professional scientific standards. At the end of the URE, students demonstrated improvements in key experimental, reporting, and analytical skills, as well as an increase in their general interest in science; moreover, the URE participants appreciated the opportunity to collectively experience an immersive undergraduate research project. Embedding active research projects into the undergraduate curriculum is able to reach a far greater number of students than isolated laboratory internships, and thus is an effective mechanism for increasing exposure for science and providing training for the next generation of scientists

The Free Energy Interviews: Scientists and Journalists Collaborate in a Cross-Disciplinary Research Journey

Many students in high schools and universities view science and scientists as “other”. Students have few mechanisms that they can use to access information about “who” a real scientist is, and “what” they do all day. In 2010 we began a project to address this information gap by (i) producing a series of recorded interviews with working science graduates and (ii) supplying these to undergraduate students in a large mixed-interest biochemistry class. We named the project “Free Energy”. Initially a science academic interviewed other scientists alone, however in the second iteration we included student interviewers as well. To obtain course credit these students, who are all co-authors on this paper, used Free Energy as the basis for their Summer Undergraduate Research Experiences. We present a description of the development and delivery of Free Energy and explain how we used it as the subject of student research projects in a Science faculty. We also explain what we as academics and student interviewers have learned from the process of interviewing science graduates in a working radio studio and delivering these recorded interviews to large groups of undergraduate students