Summer Research Internship for High School Students Pivots to Remote Model Emphasizing Science Reading, Writing, and Interpretation Skills in the Wake of COVID‐19‐Related Disruption

Abstract

To increase opportunities for participation in authentic research experiences for high school students, we previously developed a collaborative Summer Research Internship Program between California State University, Sacramento (Sac State) and Sacramento Country Day School (SCDS). Outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted our original plans for the Internship Program in summer 2020; thus, we redesigned the Program as a remote internship focusing on science reading, writing, and interpretation skills in order to continue providing an authentic research experience for our high school interns. During the first three years of the Program, we focused on hands‐on participation in physiology research to expose students to an academic research environment and to explore mechanisms for mentoring students in early phases of the STEM pipeline. As we planned for our fourth summer, we originally aimed to expand the Program by increasing the number of high school students placed in research labs at Sac State. With on‐campus research severely limited due to COVID‐19, we instead worked with the mentoring professors at Sac State to pivot the Program's emphases and create a remote internship experience. Feedback gathered from previous student interns indicated their desire to be more involved in the entire scientific process and learn how to read, write, analyze, and communicate data for a scientific audience. We embraced the unexpected turn of events due to the COVID‐19 pandemic as an opportunity to focus on these skills and continue providing authentic research experiences, even if we were not able to conduct traditional, hands‐on laboratory research with the student interns. Three Sac State mentors and five student interns participated in the remote version of the Internship Program in summer of 2020. Student interns participated in a wide range of training activities, including the following: quantitative data analysis, statistics and computer coding tutorials, strategies for reading scientific manuscripts, journal club presentations, protocol development, writing funding proposals, literature search techniques to develop new lines of inquiry, and oral communication of science. At the conclusion of the Program, informal feedback from the student interns indicated general satisfaction with the remote internship model; they valued the opportunity to learn and practice science reading, writing, and interpretation skills and felt they were truly members of their research teams. However, they also commented their research experiences were not as impactful as they could have been, since they could not conduct hands‐on experiments in the laboratory. For future iterations of our Internship Program, either in‐person or remote, including a component that emphasizes science reading, writing, and interpretation skills merits consideration based on positive feedback from the initial pilot of this component during our pivot to a remote internship model due to COVID‐19.