The Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPiE) is a multi-institution collaboration designed to introduce freshman and sophomore undergraduates to science research through laboratory curriculum. This approach is a novel means of teaching the undergraduate laboratory; as such, both the development and assessment of CASPiE are areas as yet unexplored in the research literature. This work has two divergent foci: the development of CASPiE modules, and the assessment of the CASPiE curriculum in the context of current laboratory curricula.

The module development process has produced four major gains in understanding. This first is that the focus of undergraduate research must be sufficiently limited for students to conduct useful research while, simultaneously, remaining sufficiently open-ended for students to engage in hypothesis development. Second, module developers must be aware at all times of implementation costs; funds for the undergraduate laboratory are extremely limited and as such it is necessary to make accommodations during development that account for cost of implementation. Third, the undergraduate laboratory is limited by time constraints that do not affect research laboratory work, so it is necessary to find or modify procedures to fit well within these constraints. Finally, students must be able to access the text at their reading level; scientific researchers must learn to write about their work with an audience of undergraduates in mind.

The assessment of CASPiE is rooted in evaluating the curriculum in the context of current laboratory pedagogies. In this study, CASPiE is compared with inquiry-based and traditional laboratory on the axes of student content comprehension, attitudes, and understanding of the nature of science. Preliminary findings show that the CASPiE curriculum provides measurable gains over inquiry-based and traditional laboratories on both the content comprehension and understanding of the nature of science axes.