No.  

• Think about the student learning outcomes you have for this course.  

  • Are there specific hands-on skills you want to the students to become proficient at?  Choose a part of the project that will allow for repetition and growth in those skills.

  • Is information literacy an important learning outcome?  Focus on defining the problem and doing background research.

  • Do you want to help develop students experimental or design planning?  Provide some previous results and have the students start from that iterative step in the process.

• Think about the amount of time you have to devote to a CURE.  Will you be implementing a four week module or will you spend the entire semester on this project?  Dechenne-Peters, et al, 2023, studied how the length of a CURE impacted on student - lots of approaches can yield results.

There are lots of ways to define a CURE.

A great topic is something you find interesting.  It could be your current research topic, something you want to branch into, or a new direction entirely.  Your enthusiasm for a topic will be felt by the students.

There are many different models used for developing topics, including but not limited to:

• One approach is to use a CURE to test out a new idea before committing to it fully in your own work.

• Another approach is to use the many hands approach.  Repetitive tasks that generate a lot of data by many people can be framed into stand-alone projects in a class.  When students know their work is contributing to a greater project, they can feel strong ownership and participation in STEM.

• Some people use an academic year CURE to try out different options and then use the results as a basis for summer research projects for undergraduates to continue.

Yes.

Absolutely yes.  Here are some examples of publications that resulted from CUREs nationally with undergraduate researchers:

The question you're probably actually asking is can undergraduates do research at the same level as graduate students and PhDs.  Kind of.  They can produce data of the same caliber and quality and they have the same creativity and capacity for intellectual analysis as anyone else.  But they're novices.

Being a novice means that they need scaffolding.  And engaging in research during a structured course means there's not unlimited time to complete a whole project.

Then don't!  It's actually a great idea to start small.  Perhaps you start with a three to four week module that introduces students to the iterative process of a project.  This can build understanding of data analysis, evaluation, method changes, and new data collection.  Repeating the same procedures can also improve student understanding of a skill and autonomy in performing the skill.  In the first week you could provide a lot of scaffolding in how to perform the procedure, but in subsequent weeks your support diminishes until the students are fully autonomous in the work.

As you build comfort and confidence in implementing a CURE, you can expand it when and where it is appropriate.  Maybe someday you'll have a semester-long CURE, but someday and day one don't have to be one in the same.

It's true that doing research in a classroom setting takes time away from other activities.  But consider reframing the question.  What are the student learning outcomes you have for the course, and how can a CURE satisfy those outcomes?

You course may currently serve the function of introducing students to a variety of techniques that they will use in future courses.  If that's the case, have you discussed with instructors of the courses for which this course is a prerequisite to find out if students actually remember and can perform the skills or techniques that they were introduced to?  If the answer is no, could a CURE, with its iterative nature, better serve to develop those skills?

Research and design projects include both hard skills (such as discipline specific tools and skill sets lab bench skills, math skills, programing, etc) as well as soft skills (such as group work, communication, planning, etc).  CUREs can be a good way to meet multiple types of learning outcomes associated with these skills.