Course-Based Research Experience

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Our objective is to shift the educational paradigm of an entire college into course-based research experience (CRE) education. Instead of the traditional lecture-based practice, CRE allows students to learn in a project-oriented environment by conducting authentic research experiments in the classroom.

Funded in the past by the American Association for Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and currently by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the project aims at developing an educational paradigm that allows non-traditional students to benefit from high-impact practices developed for traditional students.

While technological and cultural changes have impacted nearly all aspect of modern society, education has largely remained static, based on lectures and textbooks. To create a more relevant education, CRE allows learning the same concepts through an exciting and engaging experience, providing students not merely with knowledge, but also with problem solving tools and capabilities that go outside the textbook.

» The Pillars of CRE at LTU

All course-based research courses at LTU include the following three pillars, contextualized and implemented according to their specific disciplines.

Discovery Through Scholarly Practices

The course:

Includes questions and problems with unknown answers
Pursues answers through methodological awareness: students are exposed to up-to-date techniques and methods in the field
Tries to find original answers to those questions
Selects specific practices from disciplinary methods to find answers

Inclusive Collaboration

The course:

Promotes inclusion of all groups, especially those historically underprivileged in academia
Practices cultural sensitivity in ways suitable to the field of investigation
Includes collaboration between faculty and students, within teams of students, and between the course and other communities
Gives students agency and ownership in the process of discovery (e.g. incorporating student interests in the development of questions, research designs, and solutions)

Communication of Relevance

The course:

Explicitly asks “so what?”: why does this question matter and to whom?
Maintains an ongoing process of communication and feedback between students and instructor
Considers possible audiences for the work, including but not limited to the academic community
Presents scholarly discoveries in forms that can communicate to an audience beyond the course (e.g., a journal article, a research day poster, a conference presentation, a website, etc.)