KCC Ovations
Kingsborough Community College Receives $500,000 NSF Grant to Boost Student STEM Research
A new initiative at Kingsborough Community College (KCC), funded by a prestigious $500,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), aims to boost science literacy at KCC by engaging students in hands-on research experiences and exposing students to scientific skills and potential career paths they may not have previously considered. The grant is part of the NSF's Innovation in Two-Year College STEM Education program, created to accelerate the impact of evidence-based practices in undergraduate STEM education at two-year colleges. It is one of 35 inaugural grants that were awarded nationwide.
Led by Dr. Laura Spinu, an associate professor of speech science, and Dr. Loretta Brancaccio-Taras, a biology professor and director of the Kingsborough Center for e-Learning, the initiative will focus on providing authentic data-centric research opportunities for students in traditional and nontraditional STEM fields.
Titled “A Unified Approach to Establishing a Culture of Research: Employing a Toolkit of Common Tools and Processes,” the project will create a unified campus-wide approach to undergraduate research using a discipline-neutral program management template for integrating research projects into courses, also known as CUREs (course-based undergraduate research experiences). It will run from October 2024 through September 2027.
"Our goal is to recruit and retain students in STEM by providing them with opportunities to participate in authentic research," said Spinu, who serves as principal investigator. “We’re also trying to create a campus-wide community of student researchers and enhance students' sense of belonging in STEM fields,” added co-principal investigator Brancaccio-Taras.
The project has three main components: redesigning courses to include research projects; implementing these course-based undergraduate research experiences—aka CUREs—during 12-week semesters; and creating one-on-one faculty-mentored research opportunities outside the classroom. The goal is to transform 60 courses, potentially impacting more than 1,500 students over the three years.
Faculty participants will redesign their courses to include a CURE, and they will use common templates to incorporate research projects into their courses. "We also seek to bring real-world experiences into traditional STEM courses such as math and statistics and nontraditional STEM courses to connect them to empirical research projects that are couched in everyday matters of general interest,” noted Spinu.
Spinu has long enjoyed the benefits of creating research opportunities for students and wants to share the feeling with her colleagues. “Forming meaningful relationships with students from a beautifully diverse community, engaging together in research and adding our findings to a body of work that started many centuries ago, learning from failures and celebrating through success, and building an ever-growing portfolio of student-centered accomplishments (conferences, publications, grants, promotions, graduate school admissions, and employment offers) are simply the most rewarding aspects of my career.” Students who completed earlier research programs in her linguistic classes have delivered over 40 presentations at professional conferences and published work in academic volumes, some of which have been published in prestigious publications like Cambridge University Press.
Faculty-mentored research experiences will introduce students to the collaborative nature of research by creating team projects pairing KCC students with students from CUNY senior colleges and graduate schools into small groups working together with the goal of presenting their research at professional conferences.
Surveys will be conducted by the project’s external evaluator to measure overall success by evaluating factors such as student project ownership, academic engagement, and faculty self-efficacy in teaching research skills. “At an abstract level, we hope our students realize that research is a viable option for them, no matter how distant or prohibitive it may have appeared before, and learn the exact steps to making it happen,” declared Brancaccio-Taras. “Another important message is that teamwork and being part of a community with similar goals always creates an incredible energy that enhances our own resilience, persistence, optimism, and creativity,” Spinu added.
The initiative builds on the success of K-CORE (Kingsborough Collaborative Research Bootcamp), an ongoing campus-wide undergraduate research program launched by Spinu in 2019 that offers interested KCC students from all majors the opportunity to participate in mentorship, specialized training, and collaborative STEM research projects.