SMART CUREs: a Professional Development Program for Advancing Teaching Assistant Preparedness To Facilitate Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have emerged as a viable platform to engage large numbers of students in real-world scientific practices. Historically, CUREs have been offered throughout science, technology, engineering, and mathematics curricula at both the introductory and advanced levels and have been facilitated by a variety of individuals, including faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). This latter population, in particular, has increasingly been tasked with facilitating CUREs, yet they often receive little meaningful professional development to improve pedagogical skills vital to this type of instruction. To address this disparity, we designed and evaluated a semester-long intervention to support GTAs (N = 7) responsible for leading CUREs at our institution during the Fall 2020 semester. Intervention activities included synchronous interactive discussions, reflective journaling, and asynchronous practical exercises. Analysis of retrospective postintervention survey responses and focus group interview data revealed that participants exhibited gains in their understanding of the dimensions of CUREs, strategies for mentoring undergraduates, and use of various pedagogical techniques as well as confidence in addressing and adopting those dimensions and strategies in their courses. Furthermore, participants reported finding value in the sense of community created through the intervention, which served as a means to share ideas and struggles throughout the term.

Preparing Teaching Assistants to Facilitate Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) in the Biological Sciences: A Call to Action.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) offer an expanding avenue to engage students in real-world scientific practices. Increasingly, CUREs are instructed by graduate teaching assistants (TAs), yet TAs may be underprepared to facilitate and face unique barriers when teaching CUREs. Consequently, unless TAs are provided professional development (PD) and resources to teach CUREs effectively, they and their students may not reap the assumed benefits of CURE instruction. Here, we describe three perspectives - that of the CURE TA, the CURE designer/facilitator, and the CURE student - that are collectively intended to inform the development of tentative components of CURE TA PD. We compare these perspectives to previous studies in the literature in an effort to identify commonalities across all sources and offer potential insights for advancing CURE TA PD efforts across a diversity of institutional environments. We propose that the most effective CURE TA PD programs will promote the use of CURE-specific instructional strategies as benchmarks for guiding change in teaching practices and should focus on three major elements: 1) enhancement of research and teaching acumen, 2) development of effective and inclusive mentoring practices, and 3) identification and understanding of the factors that make CUREs a unique learning experience.

The DoC IT: a Professional Development Tool to Support and Articulate Alignment of One's Course with the Five Dimensions of CUREs.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) offer a powerful approach to engage students at all academic levels in the process of scientific discovery. In comparison to prescriptive laboratory exercises, CUREs have been shown to promote students' science process skill development, positive attitudes toward scientific research, and persistence in STEM. While this is the case, descriptions of CUREs within the literature vary widely, particularly in the extent to which they explicitly address the five posited dimensions of CUREs. This can present as a challenge to both novice CURE facilitators, who may be unfamiliar with CURE terminology, as well as the CURE community as a whole, who seek to understand what facets of CUREs impact student outcomes. In response, we created the "Dimensions of CUREs Informational Template" (DoC IT), a professional development tool amenable for use with CURE designers, facilitators, and evaluators. Application of this tool is intended as a viable step in achieving a unified way to discuss CUREs in both intra- and interinstitutional contexts.