Monmouth College is a private Presbyterian liberal arts college in Monmouth, Illinois. Monmouth enrolls approximately 900 students from 21 countries who choose courses from 40 major programs, 43 minors, and 17 pre-professional programs in a core curriculum.
Traditional undergraduate science courses often prioritize content mastery over authentic engagement with the scientific process. Course-based research, also referred to as course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), addresses this limitation by immersing students in authentic scientific practice. In course-based research, assessment practices can also mirror the authentic scientific practice, where extensive formative feedback supports refinement of skills and understanding. Here, we present two rubrics designed to support the teaching and assessment of science communication in a way that reflects how scientists prepare to disseminate their research findings. One rubric is for creating scientific posters and another for writing short-format manuscripts. Developed by approximately 100 faculty members who collaboratively implement CUREs through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Science Education Alliance (SEA) program, these rubrics outline the authentic steps scientists take when preparing to communicate their research and provide performance levels that clarify expectations for both students and instructors. Together, these tools aim to further align undergraduate science education and authentic scientific practice.
All academic disciplines have core concepts that students must learn to advance in their understanding of the field. However, students often face challenges in learning and communicating those core concepts. This is particularly true in disciplines with formal research methods course requirements. In this article, I outline the use of the board game Concept to train students to review and communicate about core disciplinary concepts in research methods courses. The method can be adapted to multiple disciplines and non-methods courses and offers an active learning technique that motivates and engages students.
Dynamic Link Libraries(DLLs) are important components in the Windows operating system, which allows code modularity, rescue, and efficient resource management across different applications. This dynamic nature of DLLs also introduces security vulnerabilities, most known as injections. DLL injections can cause huge damage to the target Windows devices, for instance, the insertion of malicious code in the DLL address space allows attackers to manipulate or even compromise system behaviors. One way to prevent DLL injections is to detect potentially risky DLLs used in the Windows system early and frequently so more security checks can be performed on those risky DLLs when adversaries attempt to inject any malicious code into these DLLs. To this end, we design a static detection tool for risky DLLs that performs file integrity checks on DLLS of user-specified applications on Windows devices. Our tool maintains a list of DLLs in the past of those apps for reference and provides a list of "potentially risky" DLLs by comparing the referenced DLL list with the current DLL list of the specified app using our detection algorithm. We define the semantic of "potentially risky" by the fact that DLLs are usually stored in the expected directory and one DLL found in the expected directory in a new version of an application while not found in the expected directory in its older version can be regarded as potential tampering or injection introduced along with the update of this application. Based on this, our tool can be extended as part of antivirus software to frequently give a warning of those "potentially risky" DLLs introduced by auto-updating applications on Windows systems.
