Should students or mentors drive the research process? Is it okay for students to get frustrated?
Research Arc
Research Arc
The “research arc” includes every point in the research process, starting with the beginnings of an idea and ending with the communication of results. Students in undergraduate research experiences typically work in the middle of this arc, collecting and analyzing data, and reporting results internally.
How we did it:
In the ARC-Learn program, students selected a polar-related topic of interest, and worked to develop their own research question. With the help of mentors and colleagues (in teams of 2-4 students and 1-3 mentors), they found existing data sets, analyzed and interpreted them, drew conclusions and shared their results in the form of a poster at an undergraduate research symposium.
Overall, this process was very messy and challenging for the students! Most students needed to make adjustments in either their data set or their research question multiple times before being able to generate meaningful results. Many results were disappointing or unusable, but the students found the “wins” (e.g., creating a data visualization, presenting their poster) fulfilling. Students found this approach often generated more questions than answers. In other words, allowing students to drive their own research process gave them a taste of what a “real” research process looks like – the good and the bad - and a sense of ownership of their work. Students who completed the program were left with a true sense of accomplishment and a sincere curiosity about the questions they generated.
Considerations for your program:
Traditional undergraduate research programs are often set up so the mentor provides the student with a question and a data set, and the student prepares results for the mentor’s use. Instead, allow the student to read the literature and discover their own area of interest within a topic, having the mentors support them as they develop their research question and find the appropriate data.
Allow students to experience the frustrations and successes of “real world” science. Freedom in this context can include choosing their own topic, choosing their own data set, choosing their mentors and student colleagues, setting their own deadlines and plans for completion, and learning new programming languages.
Allowing students to identify their own research questions and find their own data sets (many of which are huge and/or messy) can be pretty overwhelming for students, and requires mentors to work outside of their regular specialization. One alternative to this wide-open approach could be to provide a few data sets to each research team. This would also help the projects be more interconnected and enable students to work more closely together.
Set clear expectations about what the program is, what is required for participation and what students can expect to accomplish. In a long-duration, low stakes, lower structure program, benchmarks are important to keep students accountable and motivated. Consider requiring students to complete a project milestone each term to keep them on track to finish the program, as well as tangible products such as a research proposal, paper and poster.
Consider hosting something similar to the Foursight assessment to help each student anticipate where they will potentially thrive and struggle in the process of completing their project over the long haul. This has the added benefit of identifying areas where team members can help each other most.
Working with existing data sets is an entirely different task than working with data you collect yourself. This was a challenge for students – who had limited coursework to support their efforts and did not necessarily realize the amount of self-directed work they would need to put into finding, cleaning and analyzing data – as well as the mentors – who were supporting multiple students at once, each using different data sets and programming languages. Make it very clear at the beginning of the program what this process will look like, and provide necessary support for student skill development.