2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Quantum science and engineering will play a huge role in the 21st-century STEM workforce, as evidenced by national investments in quantum industries and the many interdisciplinary quantum information science and engineering (QISE) programs that have emerged in recent years. Science and engineering educators can play an important role in researching the best ways to prepare a thriving and diverse quantum workforce. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is one quantum technology that historically has had a multidisciplinary impact - having garnered five Nobel prizes across physics, chemistry, and medicine - and still serves as a crucial analytic and diagnostic tool in applied science and engineering industries. NMR uses the quantum mechanical properties of atomic nuclei in an external magnetic field to provide information about a sample’s chemical composition and structure. Magnetic resonance is used more broadly for manipulating quantum spins to encode information useful for biomedical imaging or quantum computation. Integrating NMR into the undergraduate science and engineering curriculum would help build the STEM workforce of the future, where a basic understanding of quantum physics will become a necessity in emerging 21st-century technologies.

We have received an NSF-IUSE grant and established an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional team to develop, assess, and disseminate modular lab-based materials that help integrate NMR across the undergraduate science and engineering curriculum. Along with our team’s expertise in research-based science educational pedagogies such as investigative science learning environment, process-oriented guided inquiry learning, and peer-led team learning - our materials also draw from the recent education research findings of the course-based undergraduate research experience model. Over the past three years, these materials have been developed and tested at both Sarah Lawrence College and the City College of New York and reviewed by an advisory board of NMR and science education specialists. Our materials have been designed to: (1) make use of current pedagogical best practices for an engaged and inclusive science learning environment, (2) provide students with class-based undergraduate laboratory experiences that introduce research skills and emulate experimental research in a lab, and (3) be easily adapted and adopted for use in a wide array of educational environments and courses in the science curriculum. We have evaluated these objectives through surveys, focus group interviews with students and instructors, and analysis of video recordings of different classroom implementations of the modules. Our research shows that students using our modules not only successfully master the content, they also: (1) spend over four times as much time sense-making using our modules as in a traditional lecture course, (2) demonstrate positive scientific identity shifts, and (3) make statistically significant gains in learning attitudes about science and self-assessed research skills. We see the integration of these modules into the undergraduate curriculum as a positive step towards the larger goal of expanding the pool of quantum-literate workers needed for the 21st-century STEM workforce.