学术报告
题目：Integrating Research Into Early Undergraduate Education
报告人：John M. Olson
Academic Coordinator and Instructor
Department of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology, UCLA
时间：2014年3月17日（周一）9:00-10:00 AM
地点：新生物楼411室
Over the past 10 years a discovery-based learning program, the Undergraduate Research Consortium in Functional Genomics (URCFG), was developed that provides authentic research experiences in a classroom setting to large numbers of novice undergraduate students during the first two years of college. This program has introductory components, such as the URCFG and a new pedagogical approach called “research deconstruction” that are designed to introduce novice undergraduate students to the process of scientific inquiry. It also has an advanced program for highly motivated and talented students to pursue more extensive research instruction. The URCFG differs from other research courses offered at UCLA that focus on upper division students, by its emphasis on students who are beginning their studies and are most at risk of leaving STEM fields. Since 2003, the URCFG has provided authentic research experiences in a structured classroom setting to over 750 undergraduate students, primarily first- and second-year students and new transfers from community colleges. Didactic instruction in science, laboratory ethics and professional development complement the laboratory research. URCFG students work collaboratively on multi-year projects that involve hundreds of students, each student doing a small set of experiments during a 10-week academic session. Importantly, students acquire a strong sense of ownership of their data and can look forward to authorship on a peer-reviewed publication when their project is complete. To date, we have published two papers with 134 and 264 undergraduate authors respectively (Call et al., 2007; Chen et al., 2005); a third publication with 276 student authors is currently in preparation. To examine STEM retention for URCFG students, we obtained degree completion data from the UCLA Office of the Registrar for students enrolled in the program during the period of Winter 2003 – Spring 2013. 6-year STEM degree completion rates were calculated for the remainder of URCFG students who were declared STEM majors during their participation in the program and who had entered UCLA as freshmen up to and including Fall 2007; these rates were then compared to national and UCLA statistics for 6-year degree completion in STEM. Remarkably, this analysis revealed that 95.2% (297/312) of URCFG students completed a STEM degree within 6 years of enrollment at UCLA, compared to 69.3% (957/1380) for UCLA students and 35.1% nationally. These results support the idea that early participation in scientific inquiry can improve STEM retention.
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