Development of a Mentoring Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (M-CURE)

Abstract

Undergraduate research has been shown to provide numerous benefits to students. In recent years an effort to scale the experience has led to development of course-based undergraduate research that often focuses on data collection or analysis. This article describes the design of a mentoring course-based undergraduate research experience (M-CURE) that focuses on the publication and career growth aspects of the research experience. A survey of students who completed the course indicated that they appreciated both the publication and mentoring facets of the course. The first three cohorts of the M-CURE course have resulted in 83 percent of students with a viable paper for publication. Eighty-one percent of the students indicated that they were extremely or somewhat likely to attend graduate programs in the next five years.