Abstract 2145 From Proposal to Publication: Incorporating Communication Snippets into a Full Semester CURE

Research has nine essential elements and to successfully engage undergraduates in CUREs or UREs, all nine elements should be incorporated. What a well-educated student should be able to do are: 1) Relevance. They should be able to articulate what basic, applied, or societal issues their research will address to lay and professional audiences. 2) Scientific Background. They should know relevant published background including the context and relevance of model systems chosen, unpublished preliminary work,and be able to use available informatics data, and indicate what gaps in knowledge their project will address. 3) Hypothesis Development. They should be able to develop and articulate a testable, falsifiable hypothesis making predictions their research will assess, identifying what they will measure to support or disprove their hypothesis. 4) Proposal. Research usually involves a proposal where how they will measure these things is described, along with appropriate independent and dependent variables and control experiments. 5) Experiments. Students should be able to design and conduct appropriate experiments including preparation of reagents. They should understand the concept of a control, and design controls into their experiments, indicating what each control signifies or measures. Their experiments may involve teamwork or collaboration with another research group. 6) Reproducibility. Students should be able to accurately record all necessary details of their experiments so that others can reproduce their work. Students should understand the difference between collecting replicates of data for given samples, and the need to reproduce the whole experiment. 7) Data analysis & Evidence-based conclusions. The student should be able to convert raw data to appropriate meta data, to perform the appropriate statistical analysis, and use graphical and tabular as well as visual representations of primary and meta data and parameters derived from appropriate mathematical models. They should be able to make evidence-based conclusions and relate them to the predictions made in the proposal, providing support or refutation for appropriate aspects of their hypothesis. 8) Presentation comes in many different formats, oral (everything from the brief elevator talk to a 30 minute seminar presentation), visual (posters), and written (a final report of the work to a draft of a manuscript to be submitted for publication). 9) Peer Review plays a critical role in the scientific process. They should be able to critically evaluate others' presentations and research proposals and make constructive comments. Scientists gain great benefit from engaging in peer review activities, and from revising their ideas and work on the basis of peer review. We utilize "communication" snippets, defined by the Miriam Webster dictionary as a small part, piece, or thing, especially a brief quotable passage. Having prepared snippets for essential research elements i) to vii) and incorporated communication (presentation) of snippets as well as peer review and revision, students were able to progress more effectively from proposal to publication.