Cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes associated with student engagement in a novel brain mapping and connectomics course-based undergraduate research experience

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide an innovative platform for engaging emergent scholars in the authentic process of scientific discovery. Current evidence indicates that CUREs are effective at fostering students’ development of content knowledge, motivation, and persistence in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Importantly, CUREs simultaneously offer investigators unique access to an extended population of students who receive education and mentoring in conducting scientifically-relevant investigations and who are thus able to contribute effort toward big-data projects. While this paradigm benefits fields in neuroscience, such as atlas-based brain mapping of nerve cells at the tissue level, there are few documented cases of CUREs in the domain. Here, we describe a curriculum designed to address this deficit, evaluate the scientific merit of student-produced brain atlas maps of immunohistochemically-identified nerve cell populations for the rat brain, and assess shifts in science identity, science communication, and experimental design skills of students engaged in the introductory-level Brain Mapping and Connectomics (BM&C) CURE. BM&C students reported gains in research and science process skills following participation in the course. Furthermore, BM&C students experienced a greater sense of science identity, including a greater likelihood to discuss course activities with non-class members compared to their non-CURE counterparts. Importantly, evaluation of student-generated brain atlas maps indicated that the course enabled students to produce scientifically-valid products. Together, these findings support the efficacy of the BM&C course in addressing the relatively esoteric demands of chemoarchitectural brain mapping.