Generating Publishable Data from Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences in Chemistry

Embedding Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences(CUREs)into chemistry curricula has become a best practice due to the overwhelmingevidence that these experiences deepen students' content comprehension,improve students' problem-solving skills, and increase retentionwithin the major. For these reasons, faculty are often encouragedto develop CUREs for their courses, which typically take a substantialamount of effort and administrative/financial support. To justifythese efforts, one of the most cited benefits of CURE developmentfor faculty specifically is that they can pilot research projectsand publish data produced during CUREs in scientific publications.However, there is less evidence in the literature that these benefitscommonly occur. Based on direct upper-level, interdisciplinary CUREdevelopment experience and a national survey of faculty across institutiontypes, it is clear that translating CURE data into publishable scienceis quite challenging due to several common barriers. Barriers identifiedinclude the need for follow up data that must be generated by eitherthe faculty or a research student, the lack of reproducibility ofdata generated by novice students, and the lack of faculty time towrite the manuscripts. Additionally, institution type (private vspublic non-PhD granting; non-PhD granting vs PhD granting), facultyrank, and CURE level (lower vs upper-level courses), among other factors,impacted the likelihood of publication of CURE data. Based on theseresults and experiences, best practices for maximizing positive outcomesfor both students and faculty with regard to CURE design and implementationhave been developed.