TABLE 3.

Students’ explanations for their ratings of the extent to which they agreed with the statement that they conducted scientific research in their immunology lab course

Topic	Description	Traditional lab students (n = 27) % (n)	CURE students (n = 57)a % (n)	Example quote from traditional lab student (extent student agreed that he or she conducted scientific research in lab)	Example quote from CURE student (extent student agreed that he or she conducted scientific research in lab)
Research question was novel or broadly relevant	Students described working to answer a novel or broadly relevant research question.	0.0 (0)	54.4****(31)	NA	“The research that we did in [this course] was directly relevant to the research being done by [the course instructor] and his lab faculty, and the experiments that we did had never been done before. They were done with the intention of discovering something new that can be applied to a broader understanding of immunology and the genetic components governing innate and adaptive immunity.” (rating 10)
Research question was not novel or broadly relevant	Students described the research question they were working on as having a known answer.	63.0 (17)	0.0****(0)	“I don't believe that this was scientific research because the answer to the questions posed in lab had already been answered many times. Nothing new was discovered from this research and no quality material was added to the scientific community.” (rating 3)	NA
Engaged in scientific practices	Students described engaging in scientific processes, including following the scientific method, making hypotheses, designing experiments, following protocols, and analyzing data or interpreting data.	59.3 (16)	56.1 (32)	“I believe we do conduct scientific research because [at] any time an individual needs to put on their PPE, follow a protocol and analyze data.… Also, before each lab we are required to ask questions and form hypotheses whether we know the end result or not, which means the ‘scientific method’ is in full swing.” (rating 7)	“I used tools that are commonly used in most research labs. I had come up with a question based on observations or background information found and formed a question and hypothesis based on it. My lab group and I performed an experiment to test the hypothesis and discussed and analyzed this data in a lab report.” (rating 9)
Lack of autonomy when engaging in scientific practices	Students described a lack of autonomy when engaging in a specific scientific practice. For example, not developing their own research questions or not setting up their own experiments.	7.4 (2)	19.3 (11)	“Yes we created hypotheses and tested them, however it was already planned out for us. We didn't have to design anything.” (rating 4)	“[This immunology lab course] was also different from scientific research because we did not have to decide which experiments to perform.” (rating 8)

^aStudents rated the extent to which they agreed with the statement that they had conducted scientific research in their immunology lab course from 1 = strongly disagree to 10 = strongly agree. Students were asked to explain their reasoning for their agreement with the statement. We conducted chi-square tests of independence to compare the percent of traditional lab students and CURE students who reported each category; ****, p ≤ 0.0001. The specific statistics can be found in the Supplemental Material. Of the 104 students in the data set, 99 students (95.2%) provided an answer to the question. Of the students who answered the question, 15 of students (15.2%) provided an answer that was either too vague to be coded or that was not reflective of one of the major categories. A single student’s response could comprise multiple quotes coded as different categories.