Author(s):
The limited diversity of the US STEM workforce reflects a reduced talent pool. Many minoritized students want to serve their community but may not see research careers as capable of accomplishing this goal. We hypothesized that combining Service-Learning (SL) with Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) would enable students to better understand research value and impact on communities. CURE courses were implemented at three demographically-distinct institutions (2MSI; 1PWI) and focused on health disparities, food insecurity, water quality, or ecological diversity. An additional long-term service-learning component (SL) was tailored to the experimental group at each study site. Using the Culture of Scientific Research (CSR) as a theoretical framework, we analyzed how these combined SL-CURE experiences affected students’ perceptions of research. Semi-structured focus groups (n=40 students total) were conducted within two months after the course (short-term n=21) or 1-2 years after the course (long-term, n=19). We used inductive qualitative approaches to identify themes from the transcripts. Intriguingly, our hypothesis regarding service learning was only partially supported. Students found value when they could create connections between their lived experiences, their communities, and their research projects, but saw service-learning as a separate entity. Many students adjusted career plans towards research 1-2 years after our course, highlighting the importance of long-term assessment. We traced differences in goal orientation factor structure to differences in lived experiences. In this session, we present a case study that will help individuals consider how to design experiments to support evocative knowledge creation, regardless of whether a hypothesis
