Undergraduate Research Experiences: Synergies between Scholarship and Teaching

For good reason, undergraduate student-faculty collaborative research opportunities are firmly embedded in the landscape of the New Academy. Undergraduate research and creative expression are now distinct categories of excellence in the U. S. News & World Report rankings. Collaborative research speaks to some of our most fundamental educational objectives by providing a personalized education, exemplifying engaged pedagogy, and promoting students' intellectual independence and maturation. Barrett Seaman's recent account of undergraduate residential life cites undergraduate research experiences as one of the ways that students make close personal connections with faculty mentors (2005). These relationships are particularly important a time when undergraduates are seemingly more disengaged in their education and rarely interact with faculty members outside of the classroom. These connections with faculty, across all academic disciplines and a wide range of institutions, can be particularly meaningful to students deemed at risk, including first-generation college students and minorities. For the past twenty-six years, the Council on Undergraduate Research has been a steady advocate and resource for institutions and faculty members seeking to implement research with undergraduates and create supportive environments in which these activities can flourish. Since 1989, Project Kaleidoscope has also brought together faculty and administrators to strengthen the learning and undergraduate research environments for mathematics and science. Curricular and Institutional Transformation We often cite the transformative effect research experiences can have on our undergraduate students, but the movement to provide more of these opportunities across all disciplines has led to significant transformations of curricula and institutions as well. Curricula that incorporate discovery-based and active learning have been designed to better prepare students for the independence required for a successful research experience (Karukstis and Elgren, forthcoming). Such curricular changes promote greater exposure to the primary literature; create opportunities to articulate and test hypotheses and intellectual models; and encourage students to contextualize and communicate objectives, approaches, analyses, and conclusions. These changes infuse research and research-like experiences into the curriculum. Faculty members also stand to benefit from these curricular reforms. The curriculum is the purview of the faculty and should be a direct expression of what faculty value in education. It is also one of the ways that faculty gain some control over time, which many regularly cite as their primary limiting resource. Balancing a scholarly agenda with heavy teaching commitments easily consumes available time, but utilizing the curriculum to better prepare undergraduates for independent research serves them well and prepares them to contribute to faculty members' own scholarly work. Building synergy between these two activities has recently been referred to as an act of enlightened self-interest (Mills 2005). Long-term, sustainable models that cultivate effective student-faculty collaborations take advantage of the natural synergistic relationship between two primary objectives: ensuring good student learning outcomes and advancing the research agenda of the faculty mentor. A third objective was raised a recent National Science Foundation-funded summit on the state of undergraduate research in the chemical sciences, where participants suggested that effective undergraduate research should also lead to the generation of new knowledge. In this emerging model of effective goals for collaborative research with undergraduates, an ideal project should promote student learning outcomes, advance the research agenda of the faculty mentor, and make a new contribution to the field. When projects are Grafted to carefully balance these three objectives, both research mentors and student collaborators benefit enormously from the experience (see figure 1). …