STEM educationProject gets community college students on the STEM path
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is supporting a program — currently involving thirty-two schools, soon to be thirty-even — to bring undergraduate research into the science curricula of community colleges. The Community College Undergraduate Research Initiative (CCURI) “is the first large scale effort working to integrate undergraduate research at community colleges, institutions that serve as the entryway into higher education for many students, particularly first generation college students and students underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines,” says the NSF’s V. Celeste Carter.
One day in 2001, a colleague from the conservation program at Finger Lakes Community College stopped biology professor James Hewlett in the hall with a question: “Do you know whether you can tell the sex of a red tailed hawk from a blood sample?”
Hewlett did not know, but decided to put several of his students on it.
It was an opportunity to conduct research that his students, and indeed most community college students at the time, rarely if ever had.
“I could see what it was doing to the students,” Hewlett says. “It was transforming their learning experience. I said to myself: ‘we need to expand on this.”’
The result, initially, was a pilot project that incorporated scientific research into the undergraduate program at Finger Lakes, located in Canandaigua, New York. An NSF release reports that in recent years, however, it has morphed into a nationwide network of community college programs supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that currently involves thirty-two schools — soon to be thirty-even — all committed to bringing undergraduate research into their science curricula.
“Community colleges typically do a lot of training for specific jobs, like nursing or auto mechanic technician or music recording technicians, and all of these programs are taught by having students do their craft,” Hewlett says. “Yet, until recently, when we got students who said they wanted to become scientists, we didn’t treat them the same way as we did other professions, by actually letting them do science. That wasn’t fair.”
The success of the Finger Lakes initiative, first funded by NSF as a single program in 2005, inspired Hewlett to think bigger. “I was curious to see whether what we have done here could work at other schools,” he says. “The program continues here, but our main thrust now is helping other schools design similar programs.”
NSF is providing nearly $4 million over four years, beginning with the first grants in 2011, for the program, known as the Community College Undergraduate Research Initiative (CCURI). In addition to Hewlett, who is the principal investigator, there are four additional co-principal investigators, who include John Van Niel, professor of environmental conservation at Finger Lakes; Virginia Balke, professor of biotechnology at Delaware Technical Community College; James Jacob, professor of biology at Tompkins Cortland Community College; and Jacqueline Crisman, associate professor of biology at Jamestown Community College.