DOI
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.9b00289

Summary
The paper presents a design of a collaborative Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) project between an Analytical Chemistry course and an Environmental Toxicology course to engage students in a research project that cannot rely on one discipline alone.
A CURE is one approach to integrate systems thinking into the curriculum through an intentional collaboration between courses. The objective of a systems thinking CURE is to facilitate the design of a research question that cannot be answered by a single discipline alone. Therefore, connecting the insights from the two courses requires a systems thinking approach. The CURE can be designed in a way that collaboration and discussion across disciplines is necessary. The students design, investigate, and analyze data to answer part of the question, but results and knowledge must be combined before the larger question can be answered.
Although authors used the principles of systems thinking to design their interdisciplinary CURE, this study does not assess the ability of students to apply systems thinking but rather assesses the effectiveness of the CURE.
The reported results reveal that students in both courses increased their levels of experience in skills related to the CURE project, including their ability to design a project where the outcome was unknown. Further, most students felt a sense of project ownership, but their ownership was attributed only to the positive aspects of the CURE. At the end of the CURE, the students in both classes demonstrated the ability to connect ideas and techniques learned in the course to a broader environmental research question. They also suggest several tips for developing collaborative CUREs in undergraduate courses.
This CURE demonstrated that students gained a variety of skills in research design, data collection and analysis, and presentation of their findings in a public, formal symposium. At the end of the CURE, the students in both classes demonstrated the ability to connect ideas and techniques learned in the course to a broader environmental research question.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The paper deals with interdisciplinarity and systems thinking.
Authors point out that the most interdisciplinary CUREs occur in a single classroom setting with one instructor or in a team-taught format. They report on a collaborative CURE that was designed to “cross floors” by providing an authentic research experience that necessitates a systems thinking approach. This CURE intentionally merges the research experiences between two upper-level courses in different disciplines: Analytical Chemistry (Department of Chemistry) and Environmental Toxicology (Department of Biology). Their goal was to facilitate the development of a large-scale environmental research question that chemistry or environmental science alone could not answer. At the end of the semester, students combined their data and knowledge acquired throughout the course to answer the developed environmental question.
Systems thinking was put forward as a method to transition undergraduate chemistry curricula from being taught as an isolated subject to connecting topics across subfields (i.e., biochemistry, analytical chemistry, organic chemistry, etc.) and disciplines (i.e., biology, ecology, physics, etc.). These connections can be introduced by using information from other subjects to answer large-scale problems that may not be solvable with chemistry alone. A key to making the transition to systems thinking is to introduce chemistry as a component of a larger dynamic system, such as a societal or environmental problem.

Point of Strength
The strength of the publication is the provision of a detailed implementation of a known approach, the Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), to design a project with the collaboration between two courses (Analytical Chemistry and Environmental Toxicology) in different departments (Department of Chemistry and Department of Biology).