TABLE 2.

Coding categories for students’ reflections on what they liked about the course

Theme	Brief description	Example
Ownership–agency	Comment suggests a sense of ownership of the project.	“I liked how we got to come up with our own research question and design our own experiment.”
Group work	Comment suggests student appreciated teamwork.	“I also thought that I made some really good connections with members of my group and other zebrafish groups.”
Learn techniques	Comment suggests learned or gained confidence in techniques required for class or for research in general.	“I think this class greatly improved my understanding of statistics and my programming skills, especially in R.”
Real research	Comment talks about how experience relates to real research.	“It gave us a taste of what research is really like. We got to experience first hand the whole process from start to finish.”
Course structure	Comment talks about how course was structured.	“I like that it was a project based course which we later presented our results to others.”
Helpful TA	Comment suggests student appreciated help	“I also really enjoyed interacting with the undergrad lab TAs! They were all awesome and helpful.”