Washington Community and Technical College Consortium for Undergraduate Research and Equity

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving the academic engagement of historically underrepresented students in STEM fields, enhancing their disciplinary learning, and increasing their likelihood of earning undergraduate degrees. The Washington Community and Technical College Consortium for Undergraduate Research and Equity (WA CURE) is a Level 2 Institutional and Community Transformation IUSE project.

WA CURE is a joint effort by 34 Washington State public community and technical colleges to expand the use of Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). Fifty-eight percent of Washington State’s undergraduate students are enrolled at community or technical colleges. Thirty-seven percent of STEM majors at these colleges identify with historically underrepresented groups, e.g., students of color, first-generation college students, and non-traditional learners such as working adults.

Community and technical colleges report similar institutional barriers to adopting CUREs, such as a lack of research culture, institutional support, and connections to research infrastructure. Lessons learned from this project aim to generate useful insights for colleges to overcome these barriers to CURE adoption.

The project’s primary research questions will be: 1) How, and in what way, does participation in a CURE learning community affect a faculty member’s pedagogical practice? 2) To what extent do CUREs, as implemented by participating faculty, affect and potentially close equity gaps across student academic performance, persistence, completion, and transfer? and 3) How, and in what ways, does the college-wide implementation of CUREs identify and validate promising practices about organizational change, scaling CUREs at participating colleges, and replicating CUREs at colleges in other states? These questions will be addressed via three methods: 1) a professional development program to expand implementation of high-quality CUREs, complemented by a shared, open-access CURE curriculum archive; 2) a CURE “institutionalization incubator” – the WA CURE Academy – to cultivate faculty leadership, form strategic action plans, and produce change through CURE implementation; and 3) new assessment and research infrastructure to foster a culture of scholarly teaching and research on CUREs at participating colleges, as well as increase awareness of related research opportunities among these colleges’ students and faculty.

The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.