Results from Two Years of a General Physics CURE

In this talk, I will describe two years of experience running a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) lab for General Physics students at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, TX. CUREs replace standard undergraduate laboratories with authentic research experiences. In designing our lab, we were guided by some desirable properties of a CURE lab including having a research topic that was understandable to the students, participation as collaborators in a larger research effort, and a chance to repeat and iteratively refine measurements and methods. Important design considerations ended up being the lab time frame (one three hour block each week), the large number of participants (50 students), and leveraging student prior knowledge. I’ll describe the lab and report two years’ worth of student interest and attitude data.