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Undergraduate Research Projects at the Community Colleges
Author(s) -
Hess Brittany A,
Fortner Alexia A,
Chowdhury Syed A
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.31.1_supplement.lb19
Subject(s) - function (biology) , mathematics education , order (exchange) , medical education , psychology , medicine , business , finance , evolutionary biology , biology
About 45% of the nation's undergraduates experience their first post high school science education at a 2 year technical college. However, unfortunately almost none of these colleges have adequate undergraduate research opportunities for these students. Science education, by definition is, “the learning of scientific phenomena through investigation or research”. Research enhances our mental capacities and engages students in critical thinking. In a community college or a technical college setting, it is extremely difficult and also unlikely for students to spend a significant amount of time conducting research. Along with this, most instructors do not get enough time to write grants or participate in research when they have a heavy teaching load and often times serve on various committees. However, we have now created new opportunities for our undergraduate science students who show their interst in research. These newly added projects are concise, need little mentoring, and require minimal or no costs. With the help of our instructors and using current lab facilities, we have made dozens of projects readily available for our students. Any student can pick a project from those offered and get involved in simple yet extremely relevant research on campus. For instance, we have ‘testing attention and memory related brain functions’ which uses less expensive and much more portable equipment known as ‘PsychoToolKits’. We have also included, ‘Biopac’ to perform challenging experiments related to heart function, brain waves and muscle activities, or in order to examine the ‘behavior of microbes’ in multiple altered environments. Students have shown great interest in these projects and seem to enjoy investing time to understand and work through these labs thoroughly. We recommend that community as well as many other 2‐year colleges get involved in creating undergraduate research projects and we would love to see them offer these opportunities to students who are eager to study how the methods of planning, conducting, and gathering relevant information to research from numerous sources and then being able to analyze and present the data to their peers. Students will greatly benefit from being involved in these newly incorporated projects. Support or Funding Information Department of Science, Saint Louis Community College‐Wildwood