2024 ASM Conference for Undergraduate Educators

The faculty of the first-year first-semester biology course at Wartburg College has developed an integrative laboratory curriculum that includes students experiencing the iterative nature of science, learning to read scientific journal articles, designing their own experiments, learning basic data analysis, and finally, presenting their findings at a poster session. This is accomplished using the Prevalence of Antibiotic Resistance in the Environment (PARE), a national course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that surveils the soil, looking for levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that are then pooled with student-sourced data from across the country as the foundation for a laboratory curriculum to increase student persistence and belonging especially among underrepresented groups. This curriculum also introduces the looming worldwide antibiotic-resistance crisis to the students. The subjective reception from the students has been positive. The next step will be implementing a pre-post assessment, like the Classroom Community Scale (Rovai, A.P., 2002), to elucidate the laboratory curriculum's effectiveness.