At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rolf Christoffersen (left) and Joel Rothman revamped their teaching module to suit the pace and skills of novice student researchers.

For Simmons, those numbers indicate that making difficult changes will have a meaningful impact. “The status quo doesn’t reach students early enough,” Simmons says. “We need to invent a new paradigm.”

Think Big

There’s a growing drumbeat to increase research opportunities for undergrads, including pressing recommendations in recent reports released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (see Perspectives & Opinions, “Engage to Excel”). Some major organizations already have a jump on these goals: the National Science Foundation supports thousands of students each summer through its Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. HHMI also provides funding for some 4,000 students to do life science research each summer and supports efforts to scale up research opportunities in the classroom.

Graham Hatfull, an early promoter of large-scale classroom research, created—and now helps oversee—a project that has grown from a few high school classrooms to 70 colleges and more than 2,000 students. A decade or so ago, Hatfull, an HHMI professor at the University of Pittsburgh, developed a course for high school and undergraduate students to discover, sequence, and annotate the genomes of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria linked to human diseases such as tuberculosis. It was a small course that was perfectly designed to grow. The processes and tools were simple enough even for novice scientists to understand. The vast, unexplored territory gave students ownership of their projects, and the results were often notable enough to warrant publication. Even better, the work provided rich data for Hatfull’s own bacteriophage research.

Hatfull worked with HHMI to tweak the model for the undergraduate classroom and then introduce it into college curricula around the country through the Institute’s Science Education Alliance (SEA). Since it was first introduced to college classes nationwide in 2008, SEA has had major successes, including two research papers in PLoS One and a paper announcing the genomic sequences of 138 bacteriophages. One of the PLoS One papers had nearly 200 student coauthors, and the genome announcement represented the contributions of more than a thousand students. Hatfull is convinced that the model can be applied to a wide range of projects. “[Faculty] who can identify a research-based platform that can be implemented on the freshman level while advancing their research programs will see a great impact,” he says.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), biology professors Joel Rothman and Rolf Christoffersen, along with academic coordinator Douglas Bush, saw an opportunity for students to gain research experience working on a piece of a larger study by Rothman on the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. With HHMI funding, they developed a 3-week module as part of a 10-week sophomore biology course. Students learn to knock down certain genes in the worms using RNA interference, perform a chemotaxis assay to learn what odors the worms are attracted to (or repelled by), and then compare their results with other experimental findings. The research is designed to help identify genes involved in the worm’s chemosensory signaling pathway.

After testing the concept with about 50 honor students last year and making some modest changes, they expanded it to a much larger audience: this year, some 800 students will participate in the C. elegans module. To accommodate all 30 sections that meet each week, the school opened two adjacent lab classrooms with three-hour lab sessions running from morning through evening, five days a week. The labs are taught by TAs, with help from two staff members and part-time undergraduate lab assistants. “We still have bugs to work out,” says Rothman. “Nonetheless, we’ve already made several original research discoveries, and we’re really excited about this. The results are something we plan to publish, not just in educational literature but also in the primary scientific literature.”

Not all—or even most—students who are part of a large-scale research project will pursue science careers, but that’s not the point, says David Asai, director of precollege and undergraduate science education at HHMI. “It’s not just about adding scientists,” he says. “We also need a lot more people who understand science—teachers, lawyers, journalists, and parents.”

Simplify and Succeed

A significant stumbling block to creating a research experience in the classroom is finding projects that are small enough and straightforward enough for novices—but that also move a project ahead in a meaningful way. If a research project is a marathon, the collective work of students may move it forward only a single step or simply show researchers which roads are not worth traveling. But these results can be valuable.

Andy Ellington, a UT biochemistry professor who heads the aptamer stream, chiseled away at the larger scope of his aptamer-based research to find small but critical pieces where students could contribute. While each student’s project is unique, the processes are similar enough that students learn the basic procedures together and go off to do research on their own. “We’re not reinventing the wheel,” he says. “In some ways, they can work together as a group and use one another’s successes and failures to hone their technique for their individual ends.”

Photos: Lou Mora

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