Melanie Will Cole
Central New Mexico Community College, NM·Education Research
Hands-on research is one of the strongest experiences for keeping students in science, but the usual route, a long apprenticeship in a faculty member's lab, assumes a student can rearrange their life around it. Many community college students cannot: they are place-bound by jobs, family, and cultural responsibilities that tie them to a specific community.
- Fields
Education Research
Earth & Environmental Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
course-based undergraduate research experience
STEM persistence
student retention
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Implement and examine a hybrid undergraduate research experience that combines a course-based research class with a stipend-supported apprenticeship, enrolling ten place-bound students per year in a year-long series of special project courses.
- Test whether the hybrid model strengthens students' persistence in STEM, using institutional data, retention and graduation rates, and assessments of student knowledge and skills.
- Develop students' research content knowledge and practices through core competency instructional modules and professional development activities tied to the research project.
- Create an operational framework covering both STEM content and implementation that makes a year-long course-based undergraduate research experience feasible at a two-year college.
- Measure the urban heat island effect in Albuquerque with student research teams and contribute the systematically collected data to the National Integrated Heat Health Information System.
More about the research
That raises a practical question in STEM education: can research experiences be redesigned around students' actual circumstances, and around the local knowledge they already bring, without losing what makes research valuable?
Why it matters
Community college students who cannot relocate or commit to unpaid lab apprenticeships are often shut out of research, a known driver of staying in STEM. A workable hybrid model centered on a local problem could raise retention and graduation for these students and give other two-year institutions a template, while the heat data students gather adds to national records on urban heat, a growing health risk in cities like Albuquerque.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ross Stites
Kansas City Kansas Community College, KS·Education Research
Increase the number of STEM courses at a two-year college that use course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), in which an entire class carries out authentic research as part of the course.
Mark Graham
Yale University, CT·Education Research
Identify which teaching practices in SEA-PHAGES courses, where students discover bacteria-infecting viruses, build student trust, buy-in and persistence in STEM, using mixed-methods study of instructors and administrators.
Nia Bauer
Arapahoe Community College, CO·Education Research
Develop course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) of variable length for biology courses and labs and for three non-biology courses, with a shared repository of curricula for in-person, hybrid and remote teaching.
The school
Central New Mexico Community College: 1 labs on PI Pages.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.