A Model for Course-Based Undergraduate Research in First-Year Engineering

Abstract The Association of American Colleges and Universities identifies undergraduate research experiences as a high impact practice for increasing student success and retention in STEM majors. Most undergraduate research opportunities for community college engineering students involve partnerships with universities and typically take the form of paid summer experiences. Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) offer an alternative model with potential for significant expansion of research opportunities for students. This approach weaves research into the courses students are already required to complete for their degrees. CUREs are an equitable approach for introducing students to research because they do not demand extracurricular financial and/or time commitments beyond what students must already commit to for their courses. This paper describes an adaptable model for implementing a CURE in an introductory engineering design and computing course that features applications of low-cost microcontrollers. Students work toward course learning outcomes focused on computer programming, engineering design processes, and effective teamwork in the context of multi-term research and development efforts to design, build, and test devices for other CUREs in science lab courses as well as for other applications at the college or with community partners. Students choose from a menu of projects each term, with a typical course offering involving four to six different projects running simultaneously. Each team identifies a focused design and development scope of work within the larger context of the project they are interested in. They give weekly progress reports and gather input from their customers. The work culminates in a prototype and final report to document their work for student teams who will carry it forward in future terms. We assessed the impact of the experience on students' beliefs about science and engineering, STEM confidence, and career aspirations using a nationally normed survey for CUREs in STEM and report results from five terms of offering this course. We find statistically significant pre-post gains on two-thirds of the survey items relating to students' understanding of the research process and confidence in their STEM abilities. The pre-post gains are generally comparable to those reported by others who used the same survey to assess the impact of a summer research experience for community college students. These findings indicate that the benefits of student participation in this CURE model are comparable to the benefits students see by participation in summer research programs.