ECURE Ideas
Empowering Creativity, Celebrating Achievement
During ECURE Community of Practice meetings, fellows develop new ideas for expanding the use of undergraduate research in general education courses. Below are suggestions from recent brainstorming sessions.
Strategies for Strengthening Department Buy-In
Conduct implementation presentations at departmental meeting. If possible, these implementations would be from courses in the same department. Where not possible, we can seek out implementations from similar disciplines.
Publish Individual Implementations. ECURE supports several Senior Publication Fellows each summer. These fellowships will come with a $3K stipend, plus support for collating and analyzing impact data.
Invite Guest Speakers. If you know of an expert in your field who utilizes course-based undergraduate research, ECURE would be interested in funding an honorarium for them to speak to your department (by zoom).
ECURE Presentation at departmental or other meeting. Many faculty members shy away from CUREs because they feel it would eat up to much course content time. As you know, ECURE provides an alternative, with the PREP and the PARTIAL levels taking less course time than the FULL. There are several ways we can better communicate this to faculty. First, we can share the video links for past implementation presentations. Second, we can present the ECURE model at departmental faculty meetings. Third, we will host ECURE Informational Meetings in the spring prior to the deadline for the ECURE Call for Participation. These meetings will include current and past implementation fellows to help explain the challenges and opportunities. Finally, we will look for existing teaching/learning series where we can present the ECURE model.
Chair Meetings. ECURE Leadership Team members would be delighted to meet with your department chair and/or other departmental leadership to discuss the advantages of course-based undergraduate research in general education courses.
Potential ECURE Collaborations. Below are some ideas for building cross-disciplinary or cross-course collaborations focused on undergraduate research
Cross-disciplinary partnership between a course that designs the research and collects the data (for instance, an ecology course), and another course (for instance, a math or stats course) that will analyze the data.
Same-discipline partnership between a course that designs the research and collects the data (for instance, a lower-division biology course), and another course in the same discipline (for instance, an upper division ecology course) that will analyze the data and report back to the lower-division course.
Partnership between two courses, where one course creates the research tool(s) for the other (for instance, computer science students write data collection/organization/analysis code for a chemistry course conducting research).
Collaboration where students in one course provide peer instruction to students in another (for instance, students in a statistics introduce foundational stats concepts to students in an lower-division economics course).
Peer review partnership, where students in an upper-division course provide peer-review to student presentations or papers from a lower-division course in the same discipline.
Communications partnerships, where students in a communications course (for instance, technical writing) practice on research products created from a lower-division course (for instance, an introductory engineering course).
Culturally responsive research partnerships, where students in a humanities or social science course partner with students in a physical science to design a research project focused on social equity.
End-of-semester course-based research conference, where students in CUREs present their research/findings to peers and faculty members.
Cross-institutional collaborations, where students from UNM collaborate with students from another campus, college or university, bringing the strengths of both institutions together to create a more innovative research project.
Grant ideas that build upon the ECURE framework
Extend ECURE model to include advanced (300-400 level) courses, especially those that lend themselves well to preparing students for graduate school. Emphasize offering upper division courses at PARTIAL and FULL levels of ECURE engagement, building upon lower-level courses at the PREP and PARTIAL levels.
Leverage the ECURE framework to build and ensure scaffolded research pathways within degree programs, building from PREP in the introductory courses to FULL at the senior level. Ensure that all students within the degree program have equal opportunity to engage in research, either in non-general-elective courses, or in paid co-curricular activities.
Utilize the ECURE framework in a learning community setting to build across disciplines and across engagement types. For instance: link courses where students in one course are conducting research, and students in another are communicating the outcomes; or linking students in one course who are collecting data, and students in another who are analyzing data; link lower division courses to upper division courses across disciplines or within the same discipline.
Leverage the ECURE framework in training graduate student researchers to mentor undergraduate students, and to offer paid research projects that engage undergraduate students on graduate student research.
Use the ECURE framework to train graduate teaching assistants to effectively incorporate undergraduate research into their courses, and to support faculty members who do so in their courses.
Provide cross-institutional training engagements where UNM’s R1 faculty teach research pedagogy to two-year faculty, and where two-year faculty teach inclusive pedagogy to R1 faculty.
Build peer mentoring engagements where upper level undgraduate students introduce research concepts to lower level undergraduate students.
Use the ECURE framework to create a network of universities that foster cross-institutional undergraduate research, allowing each university to contribute expertise to others who lack that expertise. For instance, University A has a strong marine biology research program, but does not have a civil engineering program. University B has a strong civil engineering program, but no marine biology. Students from University A could be mentored by faculty at University B, and vice versa.
Use the ECURE framework to build intentional research pathways from undergraduate to graduate education.
Use the ECURE framework to specifically strengthen instruction in lecture courses at the lower and upper division levels, identifying a network of expertise nationwide and providing a teacher institute.
Use the ECURE framework to provide professional development and research opportunities at the high school level, linking these to college experiences at UNM.
Develop a FLIP Seminar, where students engage at the PREP level. URAD recruits faculty researchers to share their research with undergraduate students, and provides a short summary of their research. Students then select a faculty researcher to meet with in person (or that faculty member’s graduate student or postdoc), and then explains their research to their undergrad(s) individually or in person. At the end of the semester, undergraduate students then describe the faculty member’s research to each other in a seminar setting. Based on a model developed by Joe Ho in Chemistry.
