FRESH – Freshman Research Engagement in Science: Early Results

Abstract

We describe here some early results of the FRESH (Freshman Research Engagement in the Sciences) program. A program with the goal to expose freshman to an ongoing research project during the academic year to promote student growth and improve retention in the STEM disciplines. Freshmen worked with a faculty mentor and were also chaperoned by a more senior student researcher in order that they learn lab techniques and the capacity to work independently. Participants were fully engaged in a research project (performing experiments, analyzing and discussing results), not a classic classroom projects, but discovery based projects. By bringing students into the research lab at this early stage, our aim was to improve retention by allowing science students to actually act as scientists, providing an enhanced experience over the usual freshman survey course content. Of the 13 students in two cohorts who joined the program as freshmen, 12 are still in their major and have co‐authored over 20 different papers and conference presentations to date. Based on these initial successes, we have modified our approach, tracking qualified applicants who we were unable to fund to serve as our control group in order to study the impact of the FRESH approach on student success.Support or Funding InformationThis work was supported by grants from the Indiana Space Grant Consortium (INSGC).This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.