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Nine essential Components of research in UREs, SUREs & CUREs 

Research, no matter what the field, has nine important elements: OUR CUREs emphasize the incorporation of each of these elements of research into any undergraduate research experience. Eight are drawn from generally accepted components of research with the ninth being Peer Review.

What should a well educated student should be able to do in each of these areas of a research project:

i)                    Relevance. A student should be able to articulate what basic (or fundamental), applied, or societal issues their research will address to both a lay audience and a professional audience.

ii)                  Scientific Background. A student should know the relevant published background to their project including the context and relevance of the model system they have chosen, and any relevant unpublished preliminary work (theirs or others in their research group). They should be aware of, and be able to use available data (eg informatics data). They should be able to indicate what gaps in knowledge exist that their project will address. The scientific background should be based on peer reviewed original publications not on published reviews- many peer reviewed jourtnal discourage citation of reviews since such a practice does not give citation credit to the original authors of the work being reviewed.

iii)                Hypothesis Development. Students should be able to develop and articulate a testable, falsifiable hypothesis that makes predictions that their research will address. They should be able to identify what they will measure to support or disprove their hypothesis.

iv)                Proposal. Research projects usually involve a proposal where how they will measure those things that may change depending on the validity of their hypothesis is described, along with appropriate independent and dependent variables and control experiments.

v)                  Experiments, Teamwork & as appropriate, Collaboration. A student should be able to design appropriate experiments and prepare the requisite reagents as well as conduct the experiment (with whatever necessary skills are involved). They should understand the concept of a control, how to design controls into their experiments, and to understand what each control signifies or measures. Their experiments may involve teamwork or collaboration with another research group at the same or a different institution.

vi) Reproducibility: Students should be able to accurately record all necessary details of their experiments so that others can reproduce their work. Students should understand the difference between collecting replicates of data for given samples in an experiment, and the need to reproduce the whole experiment.

vii)                Data Analysis & Evidence based conclusions. The student should be able to convert raw data to appropriate meta data, to perform the appropriate statistical analysis and use graphical and tabular as well as visual representations of the data and parameters derived from appropriate mathematical models for the experiment. As a result of appropriate data analysis the student should be able to make evidence based conclusions and relate them to the predictions made in the proposal, providing support or refutation for appropriate aspects of their hypothesis.

viii)              Presentation plays a significant role in helping to develop these attributes and comes in many different formats, oral (everything from the brief elevator talk to a 30 minute seminar presentation), visual (posters), and written (a final report of the work to a draft of a manuscript to be submitted for publication).

ix) Peer Review plays a critical role in the scientific process. A student should be able to critically evaluate others presentations and research proposals and be able to make constructive comments. Scientists gain great benefit from engaging in peer review activities, and from revising their ideas and work on the basis of peer review.