Few studies measuring undergraduate research participation assess research dissemination, despite being a more objective assessment of research participation than self-reported measures. Therefore, this study examined research dissemination activities, science social (SSI) and science personal (SPI) identities, and research self-efficacy (RSE), among undergraduate biomedical science majors from primarily underrepresented groups (URG). Data were stratified into the following groups: 1) students in BUILD PODER (BP), a research training program with faculty mentorship and mandatory research dissemination; 2) nonBP students with a faculty mentor (nonBP+M), and 3) nonBP students without mentorship (nonBP-M). Results indicate that all groups reported similar SSI levels during the freshman year of college, yet BP students reported the highest levels of SSI, SPI, and RSE by graduation. Another key finding was that, among all groups, involvement in research dissemination activities strongly predicted higher levels of SPI and RSE. Examining the predictive value of research dissemination helps clarify how BP participation produces such strong outcomes for URG students. Given that higher science identity and RSE are associated with pursuing a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate degree and career, undergraduates from URGs should be provided opportunities and support to conduct research dissemination activities, access faculty mentorship, and, if possible, access to comprehensive training programs like BP.

As the number of transfer students from community colleges increases in many 4-yr institutions, the development of transfer-specific programming has become a priority. Transfer students often do not have the same opportunities or time to form communities with students or mentorship experiences with faculty. Although they see the value of research and forming a community, they feel like they must take a heavy science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) load to graduate on time (Hanaeuer DI, Graham MJ, Jacobs-Sera D, Garlena RA, Russell DA, Sivanathan V, Asai DJ, Hatfull GF. CBE Life Sci Educ 21: ar38, 2022). In addition, developing a first-semester curriculum for transfer students can be difficult due to the wide range of coursework they bring. Course-based research experiences (CUREs) are an opportunity to engage transfer students in their first semester, forming an important part of their introduction to an often larger university. This allows them to form a cohort and interact with faculty in a small lab setting and assures a mechanism for course credit toward graduation. Training faculty to develop or revise lab courses through workshops that emphasize the value of CUREs has led us to increase student-faculty and faculty-faculty interactions while fostering student success. Several faculty have provided brief overviews of research questions that can be used to form the basis of a CURE. One example from our neurobiology faculty is presented here. Expanding these CURE options and the number of faculty able to teach these courses has increased our transfer students' sense of community.NEW & NOTEWORTHY As the transfer student population increases at 4-yr universities, it is critical to develop a pathway for them to access relevant courses, form a community, and have research opportunities from their first semester. Designing course-based research experiences (CUREs) specifically for this student population will allow transfer students to transition with their cohort into their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. This article describes how to train faculty through workshops and expand CURE options at a large public university.

Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) and course-based UREs (CUREs) promote students' scientific self-efficacy growth. Yet how self-efficacy develops during research is not well understood. Furthermore, research experiences vary in ways that likely affect students' self-efficacy development. We sought to address these knowledge gaps by collecting scientific self-efficacy data from 765 CURE and URE students at nine universities at the beginning, middle, and end of a single term of research. We leveraged a theoretical advancement, latent state-trait theory-revised, to disaggregate the components of students' self-efficacy into stable or trait-like self-efficacy and dynamic or state-like self-efficacy. We determined that students' scientific self-efficacy was moderately stable during their research, with the most malleable component being beliefs in their abilities to figure out data collection and explain results. We also surveyed students ∼45 times throughout their research experience to test the extent to which research hours and types of research tasks contributed to self-efficacy development. We found that students, who completed more analytic tasks experienced significantly more self-efficacy growth than students who completed other types of tasks, while time spent on research was not influential. Our results illustrate the importance of engaging students in analytic tasks during CUREs and UREs for fostering their self-efficacy development.

ABSTRACT Research experiences for undergraduate science students are regarded as a high-impact educational practice. Students who participate in laboratory research get to work closely with a faculty mentor, participate in authentic scientific inquiry, develop their research skills, and build identities as scientists. Prior studies have established the value of undergraduate research experiences, but questions remain about how learning occurs in the laboratory. In this longitudinal case study, we closely examine the development of eight undergraduate Biology and Chemistry students as they participate in research over multiple years. Using a sociocultural lens of legitimate peripheral participation, we trace the development of student autonomy as they become fuller participants in their research laboratories. We found that our participants progressed through a common sequence of developmental phases, in which students became increasingly independent and took on a greater set of decision-making responsibilities. This was a time-intensive process, occurring across multiple semesters in the same laboratory. We identified multiple factors that affected students’ progression through those phases, including the structure of the research laboratory and the impact of switching to a new lab. Our study affirms the educational significance of research experiences while adding depth and detail to the developmental processes associated with them.

We present the new Self-Efficacy for Advocacy Scale (SEAS), which addresses a critical gap in the literature by providing an assessment of self-efficacy (confidence) for a variety of different advocacy behaviors across multiple ecological domains and diverse social justice issues. The SEAS is designed to serve as an outcome measure, mediator, and moderator within diverse community-based research and practice, such as participatory community action research, service-learning pedagogy (especially critical service-learning), and other advocacy-related experiential learning. After reviewing the major theoretical and pedagogical frameworks guiding our research, we report evidence of psychometric validation for the SEAS. Through four studies with undergraduate research participants, we provide evidence of internal consistency, convergent validity, discriminant validity, sensitivity to intervention effects, and criterion-related validity for the SEAS. In a fifth study, we used a hybrid of empirical and rational psychometric approaches to create a sample SEAS short-form, while also providing psychometric validation (internal consistency, convergent validity, discriminant validity) for it. We discuss limitations of our research thus far (e.g., need for more cross-validation research), delineate specific recommendations for future research, and discuss implications for practitioners.

Early career minoritized faculty face several academic challenges that negatively impact their success yet have demonstrated staying power and resilience in their institutional environments. Academic medicine has recognized pseudoleadership as a challenge for minoritized faculty. Using the framework provided by Coe et al., the authors define pseudoleadership across clinical, undergraduate medical education, research and graduate medical education leadership roles. They provide recommendations to decrease pseudoleadership to include prioritizing rank development for early career faculty over filling leadership positions, identifying and dismantling hidden curriculums, and employing a transdisciplinary approach to mentorship and sponsorship for leadership development.

ABSTRACT Teacher learning is a lifelong process, and cultivating an inquisitive mindset – characterised by questioning and reflecting on practice – is integral to the profession. Adopting a research orientation from the very start of teacher education is thus critical to ensure the continuous professional development of teachers. As initial teacher education (ITE) forms the base on which this research outlook emerges and grows, examining the development of teachers’ conceptualisation of research from their candidacy to early career practice is particularly significant for understanding how ITE shapes their relationship with research. This study examines how a group of ten English language teaching (ELT) practitioners conceptualise and engage with research five years after graduating from an ITE programme that included a research component. The database consists of ten semi-structured interviews amounting to 6.5 hours. The qualitative analysis reveals that participants maintained a largely academic view of research, seeing it as the domain of scholars rather than a tool for classroom inquiry. Although their teaching experience increased awareness of the potential value of research for practice, engagement in teacher-led classroom research remained limited. The study showcases the impact of undergraduate research training as part of ITE programmes on fostering research engagement among early career language teachers.

Modern genetics increasingly relies on genomic data sets to address medical, ecological, and evolutionary questions. Investigating these questions requires a diverse set of core competencies in wet-lab techniques, data analysis, and bioinformatics. We describe the design and implementation of a nine-week course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) embedded within an upper-level Genetics Laboratory course. This CURE exposed students to contemporary wet-lab and analytical techniques related to genomic sequencing and biodiversity analysis. Each student began with an intact biological specimen and independently completed DNA extraction, quantification, library preparation, and sequencing using Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Students were subsequently trained in basic bioinformatic and phylogenetic analyses. To simulate an authentic research experience, students worked with real research samples, engaged in iterative data evaluation, and were responsible for troubleshooting and planning next steps. Data analysis was student-driven; not all students participated in all aspects of the analysis, allowing for individual ownership and specialization. Modules on quantitative reasoning and scientific communication were integrated into the curriculum to ensure consistent development of key skills. This CURE focused on understudied groups of trematodes (Platyhelminthes), with uncertain taxonomic placement, providing an opportunity to explore species discovery, marker selection, intra- vs. interspecific variation and zoonotic disease transmission. "Teaching-Research Synergy" is central to this curriculum, which is adaptable to other study systems and can be leveraged to support a faculty's research program. We present findings from two iterations of this CURE and discuss how student-generated data can contribute meaningfully to faculty-led research.

Academic supervision is a critical component of undergraduate final-year projects (FYPs), shaping students’ learning experiences and research outcomes. This study examined students’ experiences and perceptions of the supervisory process, supervisors’ roles, and factors influencing effective FYP supervision. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 105 final semester Diploma in Pharmacy students enrolled in the Research Project course at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Cawangan Pulau Pinang, Kampus Bertam, using a self-administered questionnaire distributed via Google Forms. The instrument assessed demographics, perceptions of the supervisory process, supervisors’ roles, and influencing factors, with data analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. Results showed generally positive supervision experiences, with students agreeing that supervisors listened to and respected their ideas (mean = 4.25), were approachable (mean = 4.18), and provided constructive feedback (mean = 4.18). Professional conduct and clear guidance on FYP requirements were the most valued supervisory roles, with selected gender differences observed (p < 0.05). Timely feedback, regular meetings, and project duration were the most influential factors, while supervisor gender was least important. Despite satisfaction levels exceeding 75%, challenges related to time management, data collection, and communication remained. Overall, effective FYP supervision requires structured guidance, regular interaction, and timely feedback to enhance undergraduate research outcomes.

ABSTRACT Health disparities rooted in systemic oppression and perpetuated by implicit bias among medical professionals remain pervasive across North America. These inequities are often sustained by providers' limited awareness of social realities that shape the lives of people from marginalized communities. Raising future healthcare practitioners' critical consciousness—the ability to recognize oppressive structures that cause disparities (critical reflection), feeling motivated to challenge them (critical self‐efficacy), and taking action to change these circumstances (critical action)—holds promise in addressing healthcare injustice. In this study, undergraduate researchers with lived experience of systemic oppression developed case studies with input from local community partners. These cases were implemented in an upper‐division human physiology course that challenged pre‐health students to analyze the intersection of physiology, health disparities, and advocacy. Through interviews, findings revealed that students were encouraged to critically reflect and felt confident to act against injustice along a critical consciousness continuum, with the majority describing structural oppression as the root cause of health disparities and motivation to change these circumstances. This attests to the power of justice‐centered curricula to foster a more just future in medicine and the potential to cultivate more critically conscious healthcare practitioners.

Journal Article Annotations with Zotero (JAAZ) is an activity designed to help undergraduate life science students develop essential skills for critically engaging with research articles while building proficiency in reference management. This structured, multi-part assignment introduces students to Zotero, a free reference manager, and guides them in actively engaging with scientific literature. Students use Zotero to read and annotate journal articles, which provides them with experience in evaluating scientific literature. Articles are first annotated independently with notes that define terminology, explain complex concepts, and identify the main points of the study. Then, in reading groups, students discuss the article and their independent annotations, working together to produce a consensus group-annotated version that is shared with the class. By making the annotation process a collaborative resource, JAAZ makes research articles more accessible, enabling students to engage with a greater number of articles in less time while improving overall comprehension. Students also build skills in critically evaluating whether an article is relevant and should be cited in their own research writing. We find that this activity helps undergraduate life science students enrolled in bioinformatics research courses become more confident in navigating scientific literature and managing references.

Introduction Teamwork has been shown to be fundamental to successful science research and is a skill desired by employers. Yet, students in university settings receive little explicit development in how to effectively work in teams. Methods This study seeks to develop a measure of knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to the implementation of team science training in course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) at a rural university in the southeastern U.S. across the four science disciplines of biology, chemistry, geology, and engineering. The validity and reliability of the newly developed survey instrument called Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes toward Team Science (KSATS) is described. Results Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis suggested that the KSATS has three subscales: Knowledge (items that relate the subjects' responses about their knowledge of actions taken by an effective team), Skills (subjects' assessment of the skills needed to take part in a team), and Attitudes (items regarding a participants' attitudes toward teams in a science context). Results indicate that KSATS is a valid and reliable measure for evaluating student outcomes of team science training: knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Discussion Information from the KSATS will enable instructors and researchers to measure teamwork in science.

Undergraduate research experiences are among the most powerful predictors of persistence and identity formation in STEM education. Yet, ironically, access remains limited by faculty time, laboratory resources, and scalability. The MCDB SkillsCenter is a novel course at the University of Colorado, Boulder, targeted at these challenges by combining modular skill-based learning, peer mentorship, and digital infrastructure to make authentic research training accessible to large student populations. Documenting the SkillsCenter’s evolution from a small program into a scalable course, this thesis evaluates its pedagogical foundations, digital footprint, and next phase of innovation through artificial intelligence (AI). At its core, the SkillsCenter is grounded in mastery-based pedagogy, emphasizing iteration, feedback, and agency as drivers of persistence and confidence in scientific training. Between 2021 and 2025, the results depict that enrollment expanded nearly nine times while maintaining individualized mentorship through a peer-proctor system. Meanwhile, the adoption of Microsoft Power Platform cloud infrastructure paved the way for automation of student submission, proctor grading, and micro-credentialing, helping increase certification output from 76 to 575 per semester. Essential feedback cycles between pedagogy and technology also promoted transparency, standardization, and efficiency. Looking at its next innovation, an AI study demonstrated that GPT-5 nano and GPT-5 mini models achieved up to 80% agreement with human evaluators, performing the strongest on objective rubric items. While interpretive assessment remains a limitation, the evidence suggests AI’s capability to increase efficiency as a supplemental tool. Taken together, the SkillsCenter illustrates that authentic undergraduate research training can scale, especially when pedagogy and technology evolve together, creating a transferable framework for expanding equitable research education across STEM.

Background: Black women remain significantly underrepresented among tenure-track and tenured faculty in U.S. higher education, despite decades of graduate preparation initiatives. Graduate preparation programs provide invaluable resources and experiences that support historically minoritized students’ pathways into the academy. Prior research focused on navigational challenges and barriers, but there is less insight regarding the role of graduate preparation programs in shaping academic pursuits and faculty bidirectional trajectories. The landscape for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs has endured cataclysmic shifts in recent years, so understanding the impact of prefaculty’s exposure to academia through undergraduate research preparation and resource opportunities is critical to their long-term success in higher education. Purpose: To better understand the influence of preparation programs, more understanding is needed on how to create academic spaces for Black women academics to flourish and not simply survive. Inquiring how Black women faculty persisted through programs that increased their cultural and social capital needed to navigate higher education into faculty careers is one way to reveal pathways for meaningful inclusion and retention. As such, in this paper, we asked: How do Black women faculty reflect on their graduate preparation program experiences? In what ways, if any, did their experiences in these programs facilitate their pathways into the professoriate? Research Design: We combined Black feminism and a bidirectional socialization model to contemplate the racialized and gendered experiences Black women faculty encounter during their socialization through the academy. This analysis drew data from a larger, explanatory sequential, mixed methods study focused on the ways that racial stress in the academy relates to Black women faculty’s health outcomes. We focused on the qualitative component, which consisted of two rounds of interviews with 54 faculty; in this analysis, we focused on the 17 participants who discussed graduate preparation programs and identified participation in these programs on their CVs. Recommendation: This article asserts that through these experiences a bidirectional possibility exists where Black women faculty are affirmed in their backgrounds, identities, and research interests through early exposure to be socialized as valuable knowledge producers. We recommend institutions and practitioners review missions and visions to ensure a bidirectional socialization is embedded where the Black women who are matriculating through these programs into the academy are also challenging and changing the program to be more intentional. As the sociopolitical landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming has continued to shift in recent years, it is crucial to understand how the norms and resources needed to thrive in the academy influence Black women who participated many years after initial exposure.

Confounding by gender and academic year masks null effects of a Cooperative Training Community framework on undergraduate research outcomes: a mixed-methods study.

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Hamna Ammar is first author on ‘ Enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (Ezh2) is required in mouse Isl1-expressing progenitors for proper development of cardiac and skeletal hindlimb structures’, published in BiO. Hamna conducted the research described in this article while an undergraduate student researcher in Dr Paul Delgado-Olguin's lab at the Peter Gilgan Center of Research and Learning, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada. She is now an MSc graduate student in the lab of Dr Lena Serghides at The University of Toronto, investigating genetic and environmental determinants of cardiovascular diseases, with a special focus on maternal cardiovascular health and congenital cardiovascular disorders.

Autophagy is a recycling pathway used by cells to maintain homeostasis during times of stress. Common methods for the analysis of autophagy include western blotting and fluorescent imaging, but these methods are time consuming, expensive, and complex, making them inherently difficult for research laboratories at primarily undergraduate research institutions. We propose an in-gel fluorescence method for the analysis of autophagy in cells transfected with a dual-reporter plasmid. We verify that this method allows users to detect autophagic stimulation and is a cost effective, less complex method that sidesteps the challenges inherent with existing methods.

ABSTRACT The impacts of undergraduate research experiences are multiple and varied. Working in traditional laboratories (e.g. in the bench sciences) fosters many skills, including independence and critical thinking. Likewise, social science laboratories demonstrate important impacts on students with regard to clarification of career paths, understanding the research process, fostering a systems thinking approach to complex problems, and the ability to analyse and synthesise data. Prior studies suggest that engaging in undergraduate research increases students’ chances of continuing into graduate studies, helps them form a research identity, fosters a sense of belonging, and equips them with essential transferable skills. The social science research lab offers a distinctive platform to broaden access to research while also developing technical and analytical abilities. Despite this, there is a lack of formal recommendations on effectively integrating students into lab operations. That is, how do we foster these laboratory experiences that are so beneficial to students? This paper outlines expert advice from social scientists on managing research labs, covering resource needs, research lab policies, mentorship strategies, and professional development to foster inclusive, supportive environments that enhance student participation.

Abstract As the demand for plant-based nutrition increases, improving the protein profile of legumes like cowpea has become a breeding priority. Cowpea, a multiuse legume and staple in many low-income regions, provides important dietary protein that can help meet the demand in our growing population. Our research used genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and phenomic tools to investigate the genetic architecture of seed protein content in cowpea and integrated 4 cohorts of undergraduate researchers through a USDA-AFRI REEU program. Using wet chemistry and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), we assessed crude protein (CP) within the University of California Riverside Minicore collection, developed and validated a custoMED-made NIRS calibration equation for CP (R2 = 0.86), and performed GWAS with ∼41k single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Significant SNPs associated with protein content were identified on chromosomes 1, 3, 7, 10, and 11, and candidate genes were linked to functions including nutrient transport, stress response, and seed storage protein regulation. These results provide a foundation for future marker validation and functional studies, and demonstrate the value of pairing trait discovery with undergraduate training.

Integrating research into medical education: the conceptualization and establishment of a student-led undergraduate (UG) research committee in India