Undergraduate Research Intensity

Many of us offer research opportunities for our undergraduate students, which the research supports many advantages for this approach as one of several ways to engage students in experiential learning. This week I would like to share a study that focused on the intensity of those undergraduate research projects. The 2023 paper is entitled, “The Impact of Undergraduate Research (UGR) Experience Intensity on Measures of Student Success” by Chamely-Wiik, et al.

In this study, the authors defined UGR as:

• student research that must be faculty-mentored;

• the nature of the inquiry must be original;

• students complete the entire cycle of research and inquiry;

• the inquiry must generate tangible outcomes consistent with the discipline; and

• the inquiry must be communicated to an external audience for peer review.

For this study Research Intensive experiences included evidence of students completing the entire cycle of research and inquiry including learning gains in content knowledge, formulate questions, plan of action, critical thinking, ethics and communication (Chamely-Wiik, 2014).

The findings clearly support earlier research in this area [critical thinking and communication (Monarrez, 2020); success metrics (Baron, 2020); preparedness and career clarification (Frederick, 2021)]. The authors focused on the intensity of the experience and also addressed standard measures of success (time to graduation, etc.) in addition to the more meaningful measures of student engagement, ability to make sense and conceptual connections. The authors offered a quasi-experimental, matched-subject design to study differences between varying levels of research experience intensity (i.e., Experienced, Novice, Control groups) on Graduating GPA, Time to Graduate, and type of post-graduation experience. Results indicated that experienced students had significantly higher graduating GPAs than novice or control students, and both research groups had significantly lower time to graduate than the control group. Findings also indicated experienced student researchers are significantly more likely to progress to graduate school than either novice research or control students.

Also unique to this study is that although prior studies had shown positive UGR effects, these studies were measured through self-reports and indirect measures (Haeger et al., 2020). This study used GPA at the time of graduation; the number of years to earn a bachelor’s degree; and educational experience after graduation. Postgraduate Experience was obtained through National Clearinghouse Data that was matched with student records.

References

Chamely-Wiik, D., Ambrosio, A. ., Baker, T. ., Ghannes, A. ., & Soberon, J. . (2023). The Impact of Undergraduate Research Experience Intensity on Measures of Student Success. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v23i1.32675