This project aims to serve the national interest by investigating how a successful biology course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), known as the SEA-PHAGES program, helps undergraduate students engage and persist in STEM fields. Many students leave STEM majors after perceiving a lack of institutional support or struggling to stay engaged in passive lectures. Significantly, in SEA-PHAGES courses, on the other hand, students become actively involved in their learning by studying and discovering viruses in their local environment. Previous research has shown that student participation in these interactive and discovery-based courses increases their motivation and likelihood of persisting in STEM. The importance of this project is that it intends to explore the pedagogical practices used by instructors who teach successful SEA-PHAGES courses and determine the strategies that both students and instructors feel are important for student learning. The goal of this Level 1 Engaged Student Learning project is to identify those CURE activities that instructors across the United States can use to gain students' trust, increase their buy-in to a science course, and encourage them to remain in STEM. While learning gains from student participation in course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are well-known, the mechanisms within CUREs that lead to these desired outcomes are unclear. This project addresses this gap by investigating the pedagogical practices