Expanding Undergraduate Research Participation in General Education Courses to Improve STEM Persistence and Graduation Rates

University Of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

Abstract

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program, this Track 1 project aims to build capacity for and broaden early participation in undergraduate research. It will do so by implementing and testing a sequence of course-based undergraduate research experiences designed to enable more undergraduates to participate in STEM research. Undergraduate research has been linked to increased student persistence, improved graduation rates, increased STEM content mastery, and enhanced science identity. These positive effects of undergraduate research experiences are even more pronounced for students from populations typically underrepresented in STEM. In many institutions, demand for undergraduate research experiences exceeds available opportunities. As a result, the experiences may be biased toward students who enter college with the knowledge and skills needed to do research. Participation can be limited for students who are not yet “research-ready,” including students from under-resourced high schools. This project will involve multiple STEM disciplines and engage in institution-wide changes: nearly 100 instructors will embed research experiences into more than 85 sections of general education courses that will serve more than 5,000 students over the course of the project. Information from implementing and studying this research infusion will increase understanding about how to: a) improve instruction and learning outcomes in STEM general education courses; b) improve student pathways to research engagement; c) leverage undergraduate research to more strategically improve persistence and academic attainment for students underrepresented in STEM professions; and d) provide a lower-cost, yet still effective, method for introducing more students to the value and key concepts of scientific research. It is expected that increasing access to undergraduate research will strengthen instruction in introductory courses, increase the diversity of student researchers, and result in improved college graduation rates in STEM fields. This project will address deficiencies in the state of knowledge about undergraduate student education by comparing outcomes of complete undergraduate research experiences to incremental undergraduate research experiences embedded in general education and portal STEM courses. The project team will use demographic and student educational records to measure the impact of multiple levels of research engagement on different student populations. In addition, the research team will develop and refine a new metric to measure student transitions from lower to upper division courses. Key research questions that will be addressed include: How do additional levels of undergraduate research engagement impact learning, self-perceptions, and behavior, in comparison to full research engagement? To what extent can these introductory levels be leveraged to expand the number of undergraduate research experiences, and to create more inclusive pathways to full research? Which student populations are most likely to benefit from the different levels of research engagement, and from each of the instructional mechanisms and activities? How can Hispanic-Serving Institutions more accurately measure lower division to upper division transition in order to identify students in most need of intervention? The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.