I have said on many occassions that i think undergraduate research experience is something that should be promoted highly. this post follows up on a promise i made to send on some links to people who are working on this.
In Ireland, the ESRI have recently hired some summer interns and funding for summer projects is also available to science and engineering students (through Science Foundation Ireland) and to undergraduates in health-related disciplines (through the Health Research Board). Many people also work in various capacities on different projects.
Rather than make a detailed assessment of it (which i am doing in another context) this post just highlights some of the recent papers that may be useful for people who either have undergraduates working with them or are thinking about it.
A set of reports conducted by SRI for the National Science Foundation are available below and provide lots of information on these programmes
http://www.sri.com/policy/csted/reports/university/index.html#urosynthesis
Some other references worth consuling include:
Ehrenberg's paper on encouraging undergraduates to conduct research
http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v95y2005i2p184-188.html
Hathaway, R. S., Nagda, B. A., & Gregerman, S. R. (2002). The relationship of undergraduate research participation to graduate and professional education pursuit: an empirical study. Journal of College Student Development, 43, 5, 614-31.
Janke, E. M. (2006). The promise of public scholarship for undergraduate research: developing students’ civic and academic scholarship skills. Higher Education in Review, 3, 51-68.
Kardash, C. M. (2000). Evaluation of an undergraduate research experience: perceptions of undergraduate interns and their faculty mentors. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 1, 191-201
Nagda, B. A., Gregerman, R. S., Jonides, J., Von Hippel, W., & Lerner, J. S. (1998). Undergraduate student-faculty research partnerships affect student retention. The Review of Higher Education, 22, 1, 55-72.
Seymour, E., Barrie-Hunter, A., Laursen, S. L., & Deantoni, T. (2004). Establishing the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates in the sciences: first findings from a three-year study. Science Education, 88, 4, 493-534.
3 comments:
Econ undergraduate RA's rule:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/
Scroll down to the post on April 30th: "Congratulations Joel".
Liam, this is a great post, and very timely. We should be integrating our undergraduates into our research projects. In UL, we've recently taken out the Final Year Project from our undergraduate degrees, which is a real shame.
Really, it comes down to the willingness of the staff to take on mentoring projects, which is an attitudinal change we need to make.
Cheers for the literature s well, it'll come in useful when I'm lobbying for funds for this.
Steve
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