The Design and Implementation of an Interdisciplinary CURE as an Alternative Option for the General Chemistry Laboratory Course

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) incorporate research opportunities into the existing curriculum often by providing alternatives or replacing the traditional cookbook-based laboratory courses. Over the past 50 years, CURE courses have been shown to benefit both students and faculty members alike. Despite the large number of available publications on CUREs, few focus on their implementation at the first-year level. This article reports the design and implementation of a new interdisciplinary CURE based on antibiotic discovery that combines General Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Microbiology concepts allowing self-enrolled first-year students to satisfy the requirements for General Chemistry Laboratory I. The applicability and success of this CURE course is demonstrated through the significance of student-generated experimental results, improvement in competence tests, and affective surveys.