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Authentic research experiences are valuable components of effective undergraduate education. Research experiences during the first years of college are especially critical to increase persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. The Science Education Alliance Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) model provides a high-impact research experience to first-year students but is usually available to a limited number of students, and its implementation is costly in faculty time and laboratory space. To offer a research experience to all students taking introductory biology at Gonzaga University (n = 350/yr), we modified the traditional two-semester SEA-PHAGES course by streamlining the first-semester Phage Discovery lab and integrating the second SEA-PHAGES semester into other courses in the biology curriculum. Because most students in the introductory course are not biology majors, the Phage Discovery semester may be their only encounter with research. To discover whether students benefit from the first semester alone, we assessed the effects of the one-semester Phage Discovery course on students' understanding of course content. Specifically, students showed improvement in knowledge of bacteriophages, lab math skills, and understanding experimental design and interpretation. They also reported learning gains and benefits comparable with other course-based research experiences. Responses to open-ended questions suggest that students experienced this course as a true undergraduate research experience.

Introductory biology students can be overwhelmed by the diversity of life. By focusing on learning characteristics of individual taxa, they often lose and miss the larger perspective--that all taxa are connected through evolution, resulting in the Tree of Life. In this article, the authors present an exercise that helps students develop an evolutionary framework of thought--to think of taxa as branches of phylogenetic trees. This exercise helps students: (1) appreciate the evolutionary relationships among organisms and understand how such relationships are determined; (2) understand that there is one Tree of Life--that all of life is connected through evolution; (3) learn that trees are hypotheses, subject to modification with new data; and (4) create a framework to view biodiversity and to review and compare different clades. To master this, students build their own tree of life using digital images of organisms. Visualizing the evolutionary connections between organisms in this way helps students become more evolutionarily literate. The Tree of Life exercise is adaptable to a variety of classes and to all levels of students. (Contains 1 footnote.)

Course-based research experiences (CREs) are powerful strategies for promoting learning and persistence for all students, both science majors and nonscience majors. Here we address the crucial components of CREs (context, discovery, ownership, iteration, communication, presentation) found across a broad range of such courses at a variety of academic institutions. We also address how the design of a CRE should vary according to the background of student participants; no single CRE format is perfect. We provide a framework for implementing CREs across multiple institutional types and several disciplines throughout the typical four years of undergraduate work, designed to a variety of student backgrounds. Our experiences implementing CREs also provide guidance on overcoming barriers to their implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authentic research experiences are valuable components of effective undergraduate education. Research experiences during the first years of college are especially critical to increase persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. The Science Education Alliance Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) model provides a high-impact research experience to first-year students but is usually available to a limited number of students, and its implementation is costly in faculty time and laboratory space. To offer a research experience to all students taking introductory biology at Gonzaga University (n = 350/yr), we modified the traditional two-semester SEA-PHAGES course by streamlining the first-semester Phage Discovery lab and integrating the second SEA-PHAGES semester into other courses in the biology curriculum. Because most students in the introductory course are not biology majors, the Phage Discovery semester may be their only encounter with research. To discover whether students benefit from the first semester alone, we assessed the effects of the one-semester Phage Discovery course on students' understanding of course content. Specifically, students showed improvement in knowledge of bacteriophages, lab math skills, and understanding experimental design and interpretation. They also reported learning gains and benefits comparable with other course-based research experiences. Responses to open-ended questions suggest that students experienced this course as a true undergraduate research experience., (© 2016 N. L. Staub et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2016 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 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)