Engaging undergraduates in research opportunities is imperative for cultivating a new generation of motivated scientists but offering these experiences to a large number of students in ecology is often challenging. Course-based undergraduate researcher experiences (CUREs) represent a powerful tool for scaling research experiences and reducing the systematic biases that have led to underrepresentation of non-white and female scientists. Therefore, CUREs focusing on global change ecology represents an exciting opportunity for recruiting and training a new generation of ecologists. We present a two-semester course series developed to expose undergraduates to research in Global Change Ecology. The initial pilot included 12 students in the Fall of 2018 and 10 students in the spring of 2019. We have since offered the project in each subsequent semester and have now reached over 100 undergraduate students. We assessed student’s confidence in 12 specific science process skills for three distinct timepoints using a 5-point Likert-scale. At the beginning of the second semester class, students were asked to retrospectively assess their confidence before taking the 1st semester course and assess their current confidence (after taking the first semester course). Students were then asked to assess their confidence at the conclusion of the 2nd semester course.
Results/Conclusions
Responses from this initial cohort of students showed that students improved in confidence after the first semester of the course for every measured science process skill. Overall, students went from an average confidence score of 3.3 prior to their first semester course to a 3.9 after the first course. Additionally, there was a slight additional increase in overall confidence after the second semester, from a 3.9 to a 4.1. The pilot data would suggest that the structure of our second semester experience most positively influenced students’ confidence to speak about their science in both formal and informal settings, which we will examine in subsequent semesters of data collection as well.