Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) introduce research leading to skills acquisition and increased persistence in the major. CUREs generate enthusiasm and interest in doing science and serve as an intervention to increase equity and participation of historically marginalized students. In the second-semester laboratory of our introductory sequence for biology and marine science majors at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB), instructors updated and implemented a field-based CURE. The goals of the CURE were to promote increased scientific identity, systems thinking, and equity at a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI). Through the CURE, students engaged in scientific writing through a research paper with a focus on information literacy, critical thinking, and quantitative reasoning as important elements of thinking like a scientist. Course exams also revealed that students showed gains in their ability to evaluate a new biological system using systems thinking. More broadly, because such field-based experiences demonstrate equity gains among Latinx students and a much greater sense of scientific identity, they may have impacts beyond introductory biology including in students’ personal and professional lives.

Vol. 21, No. 2

June 01, 2022

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History

Submitted: 4 January 2021

Revised: 3 January 2022

Accepted: 12 January 2022

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© 2022 E. Stanfield et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2022 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 4.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0).

We acknowledge the HSI grant, U.S. Department of Education Hispanic Serving Institution grant no. P031C160221 for funding the CURE Fellows program. We acknowledge the generous support of the Dune CURE by the University Research Opportunities Center and specifically acknowledge the support of Heather Haeger and Corin White in developing and assessing this CURE model. The long-term development of the dune research project and long-term data sets were substantially improved by Jon Detka, Gerick Bergsma, Eric Crandall, and Nathaniel Jue. We thank Amy Palkovic and superintendents at California Department of Parks and Recreation, Monterey District, for granting access to dunes in the region. And we thank the many, many instructors and students who collected and helped archive the dune data from the past 20 years.

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