From Discovery to Market: Integrating Interdisciplinary Skills through a Collaborative Research-Based Lab Curriculum

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Undergraduate research experiences and inquiry-based laboratories increase student retention, graduation rates, and motivation to pursue advanced degrees and careers in STEM fields. However, many undergraduate courses and labs are not structured to engage students in active learning and authentic research, and the lack of such innovative learning environments presents a key barrier to student success. This project will build on a curricular model developed at the University of Houston (UH) to bring cutting-edge research into undergraduate classes and prepare a STEM-literate workforce equipped for innovation. The Environmental Sampling Research Module (ESRM), which was designed, developed, and successfully implemented at UH over the past nine years, will be disseminated across a range of institutions, student types, and courses to engage students in interdisciplinary, collaborative research that populates a growing database of the geographic distribution of environmental contamination. A novel aspect of the project is a learning activity focusing on entrepreneurship, which will teach students how to bring their data to market. This topic is not common in academic science curricula.Integrating education, research, and entrepreneurship, the ESRM will provide opportunities for students to engage in the process of scientific discovery by contributing to research data, mining their own and shared data, and marketing the products of their research. Six institutions will collaborate in the project: UH (Texas), Alvin Community College (Texas), Louisiana Tech University (Louisiana), Prairie View A&M University (Texas), Rochester Institute of Technology (New York), and Southern Utah University (Utah). (Three of those are on the Gulf Coast, where recent environmental disasters will provide valuable data on soil and water pollution and microbial remediation.) Activities of the project team will include developing interdisciplinary learning modules that use computational tools, comparative data analysis, genome-spatial analysis, and entrepreneurial applications; holding workshops to train faculty; mapping ESRM learning activities to interdisciplinary skill sets; and developing a web portal to disseminate the learning activities, the expanded ESRM database, information about students' research, and published papers. The project will contribute to STEM education research by exploring (1) how the adaptations of the ESRM benefit diverse students, institutions, and faculty and (2) how students' participation in collaborative, multi-institutional research experiences and exposure to authentic research questions influence their engagement and interest in STEM fields.