Meeting Abstract
The Tiny Earth network is a new model that I have recently incorporated into my research-based laboratory course for sophomore undergraduates, Research Process in Biology. The Tiny Earth model is based on a network of instructors and students that are crowdsourcing antibiotics from the soil. This allows instructors and students to develop original research projects that have the potential to address the real-world problem of increased antibiotic resistance. Students work in pairs to develop original, testable hypotheses about how to test soil for new antibiotic-producing microbes from local soils. As a vertebrate morphologist, the prospect of crowdsourcing antibiotics from the soil was a bit daunting, but the benefits have far outweighed the cost of the learning curve. I used the Classroom Undergraduate Research Survey (CURE) survey to measure the learning gains of the students in this course to national means for students participating in similar courses or more traditional mentored undergraduate research projects. While the sample size is small, students in the course had comparable or higher learning gains to national means in several key areas including: skill in interpretation of results, readiness for more demanding research, understanding the research process, tolerance for obstacles faced in the research process, ability to integrate theory and practice, understanding how scientists work on real problems, ability to analyze data and other information, ability to read and understand primary literature, clarification of a career path, understanding that scientific assertions require supporting evidence, and learning to work independently. The Tiny Earth model is an excellent way to provide more undergraduate students with high-impact original, laboratory-based research experiences, particularly at smaller, primarily undergraduate research institutions with more limited resources.
