The Impact of Unplanned Remote Instruction on a CURE Paired with Cookbook-Style Laboratory Exercises

Abstract

Course based-undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been well defined in the literature. These authentic research experiences can be designed in many different ways, ranging from fully faculty-guided to completely student-driven (Spell et al., 2014). The implementation of CUREs is growing within biology education because they have been shown to provide collaborative environments that foster engagement with the scientific process, while promoting iterative research through the process of discovery (Auchincloss et al., 2014). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the semester-long CURE developed by our group experienced a rapid transition to remote instruction, creating a pseudo-experimental condition to compare student performance across semesters in on-campus versus remote learning conditions. In this semester-long set of laboratory modules, students develop skills to assess exposure to environmental chemicals. As originally designed, students participate in hands-on cookbook-style labs to learn about sample extraction methods and are introduced to the CURE-project, which entails authentic sample extraction, data analysis, and presentation of a poster. Rather than completing the full set of modules, the COVID-19 cohort completed the canned labs, but were tasked with virtually viewing the experimental process and analyzing previously collected data. Previous work by Kirkpatrick et al. (2019), has determined that there was no significant difference in the positive impacts on students’ attitudes between students who completed a computer-based CURE versus a bench-based CURE. This study examines if that holds true when the same research project is taken to a remote format