Beck Christopher W, Cole Megan F, Gerardo Nicole M
Department of Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
J Microbiol Biol Educ. 2023 Jan 23;24(1). doi: 10.1128/jmbe.00210-22. eCollection 2023 Apr.
Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) rapidly have become more common in biology laboratory courses. The effort to implement CUREs has stimulated attempts to differentiate CUREs from other types of laboratory teaching. The Laboratory Course Assessment Survey (LCAS) was developed to measure students' perceptions of how frequently they participate in activities related to iteration, discovery, broader relevance, and collaboration in their laboratory courses. The LCAS has been proposed as an instrument that can be used to define whether a laboratory course fits the criteria for a CURE or not. However, the threshold LCAS scores needed to define a course as a CURE are unclear. As a result, we examined variation in published LCAS scores among different laboratory course types. In addition, we examined the distribution of LCAS scores for students enrolled in our research-for-credit course. Overall, we found substantial variation in scores among CUREs and broad overlap among course types in scores related to all three scales measured by the LCAS. Furthermore, the mean LCAS scores for all course types fell within the main part of the distribution of scores for our mentored research students. These results suggest that the LCAS cannot be used to easily quantify whether a course is a CURE or not. We propose that the biology education community needs to move beyond trying to quantitatively identify whether a course is a CURE. Instead, we should use tools like the LCAS to investigate what students are actually doing in their laboratory courses and how those activities impact student outcomes.
基于课程的本科研究经历（CUREs）在生物学实验室课程中迅速变得更加普遍。实施CUREs的努力促使人们尝试将CUREs与其他类型的实验室教学区分开来。实验室课程评估调查（LCAS）旨在衡量学生对自己在实验室课程中参与与迭代、发现、更广泛相关性和协作相关活动频率的看法。LCAS已被提议作为一种工具，可用于确定一门实验室课程是否符合CURE的标准。然而，将一门课程定义为CURE所需的LCAS阈值分数尚不清楚。因此，我们研究了不同实验室课程类型中已发表的LCAS分数的差异。此外，我们还研究了参加我们学分制研究课程的学生的LCAS分数分布。总体而言，我们发现CUREs之间的分数存在很大差异，并且在与LCAS测量的所有三个量表相关的分数方面，课程类型之间存在广泛重叠。此外，所有课程类型的平均LCAS分数都落在我们指导的研究学生分数分布的主要部分内。这些结果表明，LCAS不能用于轻易量化一门课程是否为CURE。我们建议，生物学教育界需要超越试图定量确定一门课程是否为CURE的做法。相反，我们应该使用像LCAS这样的工具来调查学生在实验室课程中实际在做什么，以及这些活动如何影响学生的学习成果。
