A CURE for What Ails You: Relating Current Events to New Research in a Course‐Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) in Physiology

Abstract

The American Association of Colleges and Universities has identified participation in research as a high impact practice for undergraduate education. Course‐based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) offer an excellent opportunity for involving the most students in research, especially students who might not be able to participate in research activities outside of class. Despite the benefits, the integration of a CURE in an animal physiology laboratory course can be a challenge when working with vertebrate animals, in part due to the opposing goals of reinforcing scientific skills (e.g., statistical analysis, which requires sufficient sample sizes) versus reducing the total number of research animals. We therefore designed an undergraduate animal physiology laboratory course to test the idea that a themed CURE allows physiology students to practice their scientific skills and produce publishable results within the context of an authentic research project, while decreasing the number of animals used for the course as a whole. To do this, we chose the theme “social isolation and physiology” to contextualize the research within current events and engage students’ curiosity about how social distancing measures necessitated by the COVID‐19 pandemic may influence physiology. To conduct this CURE, a class experiment was designed using 18 female laboratory mice, with 9 female mice in individual housing and 9 female mice in group housing. We then allowed students to develop their own hypotheses and methods to investigate the effects of social isolation on a physiological variable of their choice, using the class set of experimental animals. We used an iterative course design to provide students with the feedback they needed in order to be successful, which included multiple scaffolding assignments, as well as weekly one‐on‐one meetings to discuss their research project with their laboratory instructor. As final products of this project, students gave an oral presentation of their research findings and wrote a paper in manuscript format as would be suitable for scientific publication. At the end of the semester, we administered two surveys (one open‐ended and one Likert‐scale) to assess the impact of this theme‐based CURE on students. Our preliminary findings indicate that this CURE was the first authentic research experience for the majority of our students. Survey responses suggest that students were better able to conceptualize the research process after participating in the CURE and that students viewed themselves as scientists. Furthermore, responses from students highlighted that having the opportunity to face setbacks and troubleshoot problems was a new, but beneficial experience. Taken together, our findings indicate that a themed CURE is a viable model for integrating research experiences into upper level animal physiology laboratory courses.