Welcome to our video page.

We are using CUREs (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences) to bring research experiences to a whole classroom at a time at our community college. And we have continued to run most of these classes despite the challenge of teaching on-line thanks to COVID.

Are you interested in trying a CURE in your classroom? Have you done something similar at a community college?

We'd love your questions, ideas, or any feedback. Thank you!

Hi Rosalind: Among others, I liked the focus on community college students. Is a possible longitudinal study part of the thinking to follow participating studies through the four-year college experience and perhaps beyond?  Thanks, Mesut

That is a great suggestion! We are currently tracking transfer to 4-year institutions and occupational programs such as nursing.  

Excellent!

This is phenomenal! I have been interested in incorporating undergraduate research at our community college and this opens up a world of possibilities!

Thanks for your comment.  Please feel free to contact us! 

If you would like to know more about the program, please visit the STEM-CURE Program Website:

https://sites.google.com/phoenixcollege.edu/mcc...

 Jillian, I was watching your video just a few minutes before you posted your comment.  Joining the network!

Hi fellow CC faculty! I am not too far from you in Palm Desert CA. Kudos on bringing these valuable experiences to your students. I am curious about what course(s) you implement your CURE in. It can be so hard to find space in these high unit majors. I use a genomics CURE in my Molecular and Cell Biology class. This means there are some other more traditional labs that we skip, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.

Hi! This is such a neat project! It's so important to make science accessible and reach out to first-generation college students. Having mentors is such a great idea too! How do the CURE mentors get to be mentors? 

Hi there!  I truly enjoyed your video and learning about your project.  It is great to hear what this project is doing for its students.  I was intrigued by the CURE student mentor.  How was she selected to serve as mentor.  What is the ratio of mentor to students?  Keep up the great work.

Thank you for taking time to learn about our project.  Our student mentors are embedded into our CURE courses.  They are often former students who have taken the class or who have participated in the CURE.  They receive training through our student success specialist program and provide in-class support throughout the semester.  As many of our CUREs are embedded into labs the ration can be anywhere from 1 student mentor to 12 or 24 students.  The student mentors have been essential to the success of our CUREs and invaluable to our students especially when transitioning to the online environment due to the pandemic.  

What a great program! CURE's are amazing experiences for students and for instructors they are so much more fun to teach than traditional lecture courses. It is wonderful to see these experiences provided early and often at you community college. Congratulation!  Are there particular professional development you have provided to instructors or do you rely on instructors to find the training they need to offer CURE's? Our project has been doing professional development supporting instructors to learn leading statistical software tools in support of course-based research that requires data analytics (e.g., R, SAS, Stata, SPSS). Let us know if we can be helpful. passiondrivenstatistics.com

Thank you Lisa! We do a summer professional development and a year long mentorship for faculty to help them develop their CUREs. I will definitely be reaching out for help with professional development on statistics tools for faculty. I have been trying to retrain using R, and trying to incorporate more stats in my bio courses, but it is tough to do and keep up with COVID, course design, mentoring and teaching. Thanks for reaching out and posting!

Excellent initiative! It is great to see how students are learning while engaging in solve community problems.

Keep up the great work!

I am very intrigued by CUREs and would like to learn more about how you support faculty in developing them. Also, do you have any longitudinal data yet on whether students who participate in CUREs in community college do persist into a STEM major at a 4-year university?

Thank you for viewing our video!  We currently provide faculty with stipends and mentors to help them design, implement and assess their CUREs.  Interested faculty submit a CURE project proposal and once selected, attend a summer training academy where they collaborate with community partners, student mentors, and faculty mentors to further develop their projects.  We are working with our institutional research office to track persistence and transfer data for students who participated in CUREs vs students in non-CURE courses.  We are currently in year 3 of the grant so hope to have more transfer and persistence data by the end of year 5.  

Introducing STEM research experiences to undergrads is important work and it is particularly impressive that you all are doing this at a community college where students are often not provided such experiences! How do the students get trained to mentor other students? What types of opportunities are provided to support them in developing those skills?

Hello Jonee, Thank you for being interested in our project. Our program hosts a short training workshop before the semester starts for both student mentors and professors --to set expectations. We continue to me meet with the students every 2 weeks during the semester to offer guidance and problem-solving sessions. We also give the new student mentors a chance to talk to the 'old' student mentors to hear about challenges and success. It's definitely a part of the project that we are hoping to deepen. Do you have any suggestions for us? We'd love some ideas.

Nichole, this is a nicely done video. I am glad that such a program like CUREs exist for community college STEM students. It's important that community college students have access to undergraduate research as this is such an important part of learning, but seems to be mostly available to 4-year universities and colleges.