First-Year Students as Scholars

Pepperdine University, Malibu CA

Investigators

Abstract

Pepperdine University has received an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources Design and Development tier award to integrate high impact teaching practices that have been demonstrated to promote student success into a set of first-year seminars. In collaboration with colleagues at Whittier College, an Hispanic Serving Institution, the PI team proposes to integrate authentic scholarly research in biology into conventional first-year seminars, thereby invigorating and transforming introductory coursework into a First-Year Students as Scholars Program (SAS-Program). Through this novel approach, biology majors will be engaged in authentic research during their first college term. At Pepperdine, a subset of those students will apply for and receive an apprenticeship in an active research laboratory. This will prepare those students for total immersion in research the following summer, after which they will serve as student mentors to the next cohort of first-year biology majors. Both engagement in undergraduate research and participation in first-year seminars have been identified as high impact practices and established as one of the most effective approaches to improving the retention and performance of underrepresented or at-risk populations of STEM students. Thus, the program will benefit all students involved, including first-generation, low-income students and those belonging to underrepresented groups. The first-year seminars will welcome students into a scholarly identity group, engaged in authentic research that applies the scientific method to real world problems. This experience not only will serve to orient high school graduates to successful college life, reducing anxiety during a pivotal transition, but also will invigorate the basic principles being learned in concurrent introductory courses, such as chemistry, biology, statistics, and physics. The project will use a mixed-methods approach both to investigate how well students learned and to elicit student perspectives of the course design and implementation and how these perspectives change over time. In addition faculty-mentors will assess learning objectives of the first-year seminars using an Erbes' survey instrument (Erbes 2008; Carr et al. 2013). This will allow longitudinal comparisons with previous outcomes and focus on skills required to implement the scientific method in "co-creating knowledge with faculty" (Chopp 2014). Examples of student behaviors to be observed include the ability to: complete a primary literature review, identify gaps in knowledge, design appropriate experiments to test hypotheses, employ appropriate statistical methods, solve unanticipated problems, interpret empirical results, etc. The results of the project's evaluation will enhance the general knowledge within the undergraduate STEM education enterprise of the most effective practices for the integration of authentic research in a first-year seminar. This project is funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education in support of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/.