Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) meet national recommendations for integrating research experiences into life science curricula. As such, CUREs have grown in popularity and many research studies have focused on student outcomes from CUREs. Institutional change literature highlights that understanding faculty is also key to new pedagogies succeeding. To begin to understand faculty perspectives on CUREs, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 61 faculty who teach CUREs regarding why they teach CUREs, what the outcomes are, and how they would discuss a CURE with a colleague. Using grounded theory, participant responses were coded and categorized as tangible or intangible, related to both student and faculty-centered themes. We found that intangible themes were prevalent, and that there were significant differences in the emphasis on tangible themes for faculty who have developed their own independent CUREs when compared with faculty who implement pre-developed, national CUREs. We focus our results on the similarities and differences among the perspectives of faculty who teach these two different CURE types and explore trends among all participants. The results of this work highlight the need for considering a multi-dimensional framework to understand, promote, and successfully implement CUREs.

We recommend using backward design to develop course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). The defining hallmark of CUREs is that students in a formal lab course explore research questions with unknown answers that are broadly relevant outside the course. Because CUREs lead to novel research findings, they represent a unique course design challenge, as the dual nature of these courses requires course designers to consider two distinct, but complementary, sets of goals for the CURE: 1) scientific discovery milestones (i.e., research goals) and 2) student learning in cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains (i.e., pedagogical goals). As more undergraduate laboratory courses are re-imagined as CUREs, how do we thoughtfully design these courses to effectively meet both sets of goals? In this Perspectives article, we explore this question and outline recommendations for using backward design in CURE development.

Summer bridge programs are designed to help transition students into the college learning environment. Increasingly, bridge programs are being developed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines because of the rigorous content and lower student persistence in college STEM compared with other disciplines. However, to our knowledge, a comprehensive review of STEM summer bridge programs does not exist. To provide a resource for bridge program developers, we conducted a systematic review of the literature on STEM summer bridge programs. We identified 46 published reports on 30 unique STEM bridge programs that have been published over the past 25 years. In this review, we report the goals of each bridge program and whether the program was successful in meeting these goals. We identify 14 distinct bridge program goals that can be organized into three categories: academic success goals, psychosocial goals, and department-level goals. Building on the findings of published bridge reports, we present a set of recommendations for STEM bridge programs in hopes of developing better bridges into college.

Previous proof-of-concept measurements on single-layer two-dimensional membrane-protein crystals performed at X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) have demonstrated that the collection of meaningful diffraction patterns, which is not possible at synchrotrons because of radiation-damage issues, is feasible. Here, the results obtained from the analysis of a thousand single-shot, room-temperature X-ray FEL diffraction images from two-dimensional crystals of a bacteriorhodopsin mutant are reported in detail. The high redundancy in the measurements boosts the intensity signal-to-noise ratio, so that the values of the diffracted intensities can be reliably determined down to the detector-edge resolution of 4 Å. The results show that two-dimensional serial crystallography at X-ray FELs is a suitable method to study membrane proteins to near-atomic length scales at ambient temperature. The method presented here can be extended to pump–probe studies of optically triggered structural changes on submillisecond timescales in two-dimensional crystals, which allow functionally relevant large-scale motions that may be quenched in three-dimensional crystals.