As part of an NSF-funded project in the Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM (TUES) program, faculty at Central Michigan University (a Ph.D.-granting institution), Delta College (a community college), and Saginaw Valley State University (a PUI), all in the Great Lakes Bay Region of Michigan, have collaborated to integrate research-based projects into laboratory curricula. The projects all have water quality aspects to them, and they span lower level to upper level courses within biology and chemistry departments. Outcomes are measured by administration of pre- and post-activity surveys to control and experimental groups. During the presentation, the general project will be briefly described, with a focus on the overall collaborative process  On a more specific level, research-based labs integrated into an advanced biochemistry laboratory course will be discussed. These have allowed students to use cutting edge techniques such as quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR) methods and other EPA-approved methods to measure fecal contamination in freshwater. The development of materials, the experiments themselves, and the student attitude results will be described.  This NSF-TUES project has been ongoing for about three years and has allowed our undergraduate students to gain experience in more "real" type research situations than are often available to them in laboratory course.

Bringing the outdoors in: A multi-institution, multi-course, collaborative effort to integrate water quality projects into laboratory curricula

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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