Guest Foreword - American Chemical Society

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Downloaded by 80.82.77.83 on May 12, 2018 | https://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): November 22, 2016 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2016-1231.pr002

Guest Foreword Undergraduate research is a uniquely American invention. The ability to enter a laboratory and to embrace the unknown world, where a discovery is just around the corner, is a heady experience. This is why undergraduate research is considered a transformative experience, because done right, an authentic research project changes the individual who is doing the research. Early introduction to authentic research captures student interest and encourages them to continue with their studies. The student testimonials in the Lab Tales chapter of this interesting monograph on The Power and Promise of Early Research reveal what generations of excellent teachers have known for a long time – immersion in science research works. The difficulty of undergraduate research is scale. To be truly authentic, and thus transformative, emerging scholars in the lab need to be guided by experts who clearly care for their junior collaborators. This apprenticeship model is time consuming, absolutely essential, and difficult to scale. This is why predominately undergraduate institutions (PUIs) have led the way in guiding generation after generation of undergraduates through authentic research experiences. It is why PUIs send a higher percentage of their graduates on to graduate school than do our large research universities. To provide more undergraduates authentic research experiences to students, dedicated teachers have developed the idea of coursebased undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), so that more students can be exposed to undergraduate research. This book is replete with successful examples of CUREs. My own journey through the faculty ranks is filled with examples of the transformative nature of undergraduate research projects. When I started teaching physical chemistry at Lake Forest College in 1989, I was told that I should work with students only after they had taken my junior level physical chemistry course. I soon realized that this meant I would be continually training new students, who would only have a year to work in the lab before graduating. In 1991 I started teaching the advanced general chemistry course at Lake Forest, which I made into a discussion-based course, where students read the book and answered homework problems BEFORE class. At the end of that academic year I took on two first year students from that class as summer researchers, Karl Kirschner and Tricia Lively, whose enthusiasm and dedication compensated for their lack of physical chemistry knowledge, and converted me to the model of early introduction to research. Both of them worked with me for their undergraduate careers, wrote outstanding Honors senior theses, and went on to earn PhD’s and have distinguished careers as research scientists.

xiii Murray et al.; The Power and Promise of Early Research ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.

Downloaded by 80.82.77.83 on May 12, 2018 | https://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): November 22, 2016 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2016-1231.pr002

My first introduction to CUREs came in 1992, when I began teaching the project-based laboratory for our advanced general chemistry course. In this lab, which had been taught at Lake Forest for some time before I arrived, students received a slip of paper with no instructions but the brief requirement: prove Boyle’s Law and they had to develop the lab protocol themselves. This lab had a series of this type of requirement; Boyle’s Law is one example among others. Two of my best researchers came out of the 1993 class, Ed Sherer and Gordon Turner, who started research the summer after that first year, and went on to PhD degrees and successful research careers. They still talk about that lab to this day. When I moved to Hamilton College in 1998, inspired by what early introduction to research could do, I started programs in chemistry and in all the sciences, supported by the Dreyfus Foundation and NSF, to introduce research to incoming Hamilton students. Students arrived after high school graduation for five weeks of immersive research in one of the faculty’s laboratories, and then matriculated into the college later that summer. A statistical analysis of the selected students versus a control group of applicants over the five year period of the National Science Foundation’s Science Talent Expansion Program NSF-STEP grant found that 76% selected a science or math major compared to only 55% for the non-participants, with a significance of p