Science Literacy & Research Basics

Below are the course outline and syllabus for a proposed course on the fundamentals of research in the physical sciences. The course is designed for the Colorado Community College system, which currently lacks any sort of research fundamentals curriculum. While students at a large, research institution have informal learning options available by engaging with their professors and upper classmates, this is unavailable to students at two-year colleges, and since most physics and astronomy courses are focused on transfer to a university, this course aims to prepare students for later research engagement.

Even students at four-year institutions could use a research fundamentals course to help them engage meaningfully with their research experience, so this course could easily be used at universities as well.  The University of Colorado, for instance, has a robust physics and astrophysics program that requires student to fulfill a research requirement (p. 5) in their upper years, and this curriculum could be a prerequisite to independent research projects.