Abstract 2233 Enhancing Diversity in Science: Starting and Sustaining Undergraduate Research for All students

The Vision and Change Report emphasized the need to incorporate undergraduate research into the curriculum not only of life science majors but all students, based on two editorials: "Ability to Recite Fails to Excite" Times Higher Education Supplement, Ellis Bell, 2000, and "Hands-on research experiences, though inherently inefficient with respect to faculty effort per student, are strikingly effective in their impact on young people's lives" Tom Cech, Science Editorial, 2003. In recent years it has become increasingly apparent that research is a high impact teaching practice that lead to positive outcomes in conceptual understanding and skills development, both essential for effective workforce development. Research, with 9 essential components related to relevance, scientific background, hypothesis development, proposals, design & execution of experiments, reproducibility, data analysis and evidence based conclusions, communication (oral, written and visual), and peer review provides essential technical and "soft" skills required for success in the modern world. The format that undergraduate research experiences take varies significantly depending upon the nature of the institution. In institutions with large numbers of students in the major, providing research experiences for all students presents problems. Flexibility in the ways that research experience is gained is essential. This experience might be obtained by mentored research in the research lab (UREs). Alternatively, it could be via a summer research experience (SUREs) or through course-based undergraduate research (CUREs). To inclusively provide a research experience to students, faculty and institutions will need to take advantage of all models of undergraduate research to more widely deliver this high impact experience to all students. Individual faculty members, by applying the principles of Backward design where one first considers the desired outcomes (both student focused and faculty focused using rubrics to know that you have successfully incorporated all the essential elements of research and contribute to the achievement of departmental and institutional goals) helps them accomplish their goals by designing the appropriate approaches to optimize those measurable outcomes. In the case of designing student-centered research experiences this entails defining what the student-centered outcomes are as well as the faculty and research-centered outcomes. Emphasizing accessibility for underrepresented students is key to successfully implementing and sustaining undergraduate research with a combination of UREs, SUREs and CUREs and is key to faculty and institutional success. Best practices for both undergraduate student activities and faculty and department implementation will be presented and illustrated, and will focus on individual research group structure and management, grant writing and research publishing strategies as well as aligning outreach activities as an essential part of research with undergraduates. These will be presented in the context of both starting and sustaining faculty mentored undergraduate research activities.