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Chapter 15
Institutionalizing Undergraduate Research and Scaffolding Undergraduate Research Experiences in the STEM Curriculum Mitch Malachowski,1 Jeffrey M. Osborn,2 Kerry K. Karukstis,*,3 Jillian Kinzie,4 and Elizabeth L. Ambos5 1Department
of Chemistry, University of San Diego, 5998 Alcalá Park, San Diego, California 92110, United States 2School of Science, The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, New Jersey, 08628-0718, United States 3Department of Chemistry, Harvey Mudd College, 301 Platt Boulevard, Claremont, California 91711, United States 4Center for Postsecondary Research, Indiana University School of Education, 1900 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47406–7512, United States 5Council on Undergraduate Research, 734 15th St NW, Suite 850, Washington, DC 20005, United States *E-mail:
[email protected].
Participation in undergraduate research provides welldocumented benefits to students, including high academic achievement, educational persistence, and significant gains in knowledge and skills. For over twenty years, the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) has assisted institutions to implement undergraduate research as an effective pedagogical tool and enhance the research culture on their campuses. The initial design of our “Institutionalizing Undergraduate Research” national workshop has been team-based, involving the participation of 8 to 15 institutional teams of four to six individuals. At the heart of the workshop is the expectation that each team, with the aid of an expert facilitator, will generate a series of goals to integrate UGR into the culture of the institution. With the support of the National Science Foundation, we modified the design of these
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workshops to achieve even more significant outcomes beyond institutionalizing undergraduate research. Our first variant was a series of eight regional workshops covering the major geographical regions of the United States to encourage and support regional faculty networking and sharing of ideas. Next we worked with larger organizational units that had similar or closely related missions: state systems and public and private consortia. This effort aimed to improve the undergraduate research culture at each of the constituent campuses and within the larger systems/consortia by leveraging the synergy, influence, and power of the systems and consortia. Despite the expanding focus on undergraduate research across the country, equity gaps in attaining research opportunities persist. To address this shortcoming, CUR is now partnering with Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research to assist faculty in departments of biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology in designing and implementing backward-designed four-year curricula to provide all students with equitable access to the benefits of undergraduate research. Research is also being conducted to characterize the factors that enable students and their learning to flourish in an inquiry-driven curriculum and to identify the strategies that support faculty, departments, and institutions in catalyzing and sustaining curricular change.
Introduction Undergraduate research (UGR) is one of the ten high-impact practices that have gained considerable traction in undergraduate education (1), serving as a mechanism for enhancing student learning, faculty research, and institutional missions. Undergraduate research benefits students across demographic groups and disciplines, providing even greater gains for students traditionally underserved by higher education (2–7). Undergraduate research exemplifies high levels of academic rigor, fosters active and collaborative learning, builds student-faculty interactions, and lends itself to student-centered, supportive campus environments. UGR is a compelling way to meld the interests of faculty to engage in scholarly work with the needs of students for challenging experiences that lead to substantial impacts on their cognitive and affective development. The benefits of UGR have been recognized to impact all key stakeholders in higher education: students, faculty, two-year and four-year institutions, graduate and professional institutions, business and corporate associates, and non-profit community partners (7). The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) has been offering workshops on institutionalizing UGR to teams of faculty and administrators interested in embedding more UGR research across their campuses since 1996 (8). These workshops use a collaborative institutional team model with four to six participants from each institution working with an expert facilitator to craft action 260
plans that will lead to a fully institutionalized UGR program (8, 9). Over the past twenty years, CUR has worked with over 600 institutions in generating their action plans—which include goals, strategies, and assessments. Workshops include considerable amounts of time for team members to network with each other and with the other teams. The workshops culminate with final presentations made by each team where they share their action plans and their dreams and aspirations with each other. Over the years, the basic design of the workshops remained fairly consistent–including a strategic balance of presentations, breakout discussions, and networking–but the institutions we have targeted have changed. For the first ten years, individual institutions applied to participate, and they were selected based on self-studies they submitted as part of their application materials. Other than our determination that conditions were ripe on the selected campuses for UGR to take hold, there were no common institutional characteristics to the campuses selected. Beginning in 2006, we broadened our efforts to help institutions that did not have a tradition or culture of campus-wide engagement in UGR. With support of an NSF–Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) Phase 2 award (#0618721), “A Workshop Initiative by CUR to Establish, Enhance, and Institutionalize Undergraduate Research” (10), we designed and held workshops in eight regions of the country to encourage regional faculty networking and sharing of ideas. We also conducted follow-up visits (one year after each workshop) to each of the 64 participating campuses to enhance sustainability by engaging a broader cohort on each campus. We have found that one year after the workshop is a critical time when progress towards each team’s goals can either stagnate or be propelled forward, so providing assistance at this time is critical to the success of the initiative. As one example, the developments at Whittier College, a 2008 participant and a Hispanic-Serving Institution in southern California, illustrate the long-term impact and sustainability of our project. Noting that the College made a commitment to undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity (URSCA), Whittier selected URSCA as a major theme in their 2013 college-wide accreditation review. As an outcome of the CUR workshop, Whittier recognized the need to increase funding to enhance UGR activity on their campus. They hired a full-time grants manager and received funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation in 2009 to provide internships and research assistantships. To showcase UGR on their campus, Whittier established (in 2011) an annual Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (URSCA) Presentation Day. In 2012, Whittier faculty reported findings that presentations in off-campus research conferences enhanced student researchers’ critical thinking and communication (11). The campus responded by serving as a venue for such events, including the Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research in 2013 and the Southern California Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Conference in 2014. A Whittier undergraduate was highlighted in a Los Angeles Times article, “Universities are focusing more on undergraduate research projects” (Nov. 27, 2014). Now more than 150 undergraduates present at the annual URSCA Day on campus. These outcomes are indicative of a campus that has strategically followed their CUR workshop-created action plan to institutionalize UGR. 261
Scaling-Up: Working with Systems and Consortia As illustrated by the Whittier example, we were able to document many successes from the campuses with whom we engaged. The project’s broadest impact was ensuring the sustainable implementation of UGR at the participating institutions and building regional UGR communities. The design of the project, however, was quite person-intensive with follow-up visits to 64 campuses. We subsequently shifted to a new model that would be more sustainable and would lead to even broader impacts. This model involved partnering with state systems and public and private consortia and their member campuses as a way to leverage the power of the system/consortium offices to assist the institutions in embracing their goals. In 2010, with the support of an NSF-CCLI Phase 3 award (#0920275), “A Workshop Program on Institutionalizing Undergraduate Research for State Systems and Consortia” (12), we designed a program that brought together institutions that already were connected by being part of the same system/consortium. The existing relationships among the campuses and the established structures for contact among the institutions were natural modes of communication that proved to be an important component of this project and expanding the adoption of UGR at scale.
Influencing Change at Scale: A Coordinated and Sustained Workshop Model In this project, we targeted public and private systems and consortia to leverage the capacity of these large-scale units to help shape their member campuses. The project received unprecedented interest from public and private institutional coalitions, as evidenced by the fact that 24 systems/consortia applied for support, with six receiving awards. The participating systems/consortia included: California State University System (CSU), University of Wisconsin System (UW), Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC), City University of New York System (CUNY), Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA), and Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE). Over the course of the project, we worked with 85 institutions from these six systems/consortia. We offered workshops for each system/consortium with curricula tailored for each group. Plenary and breakout sessions addressed such topics as faculty hiring; tenure/promotion and workload issues; curriculum case studies; funding; assessment; supporting nontraditional students in UGR; UGR as a high-impact practice; connecting service learning, community-based learning and international education with UGR; establishing ties to research-intensive and doctoral-granting institutions; promoting UGR in all disciplines; and communicating with external constituents. Workshops were attended by system/consortium office representatives and teams from the member campuses, allowing us to learn about the individual schools as well as how each system/consortium functioned and influenced their member campuses. Interestingly, although similarities existed among the systems/consortia, there were many structural differences that we needed to understand to effectively work with the campuses. 262
Each workshop was designed to achieve four interconnected goals: (a) Provide teams with information on the status and landscape of UGR at the national level; (b) Help each system/consortium in building and enhancing a culture that supports UGR, both at the individual institution level and the system/consortium level; (c) Assist the system/consortium and the constituent campuses in articulating goals for institutionalizing UGR, as well as developing strategies to achieve these goals on each campus; and (d) Help identify common challenges and opportunities among the campuses and develop an integrated approach supported by the central office that will aid in expanding the UGR capacity throughout the system/consortium. Each team worked with an expert facilitator to draft their UGR plans for vetting and implementation after their return to campus. The facilitators played a crucial role in the success of the project and were carefully selected for their range of experiences, understanding of the national issues, and, most importantly, their ability to facilitate the work of the teams and to help them dream big while generating realistic goals. A major difference between our work with systems/consortia and the earlier project was the design and implementation of follow-up activities. For this project, we brought together all of the system/consortium participants for a second workshop approximately one year after the initial one. Each campus team shared its successes and challenges and, with the assistance of the system/consortium leaders, developed strategies for addressing challenges. Another distinctive aspect of this project involved holding a Summit meeting in Washington, D.C. in March 2014 for campus teams from all 85 participating institutions as well as leaders from each of the six systems/consortia. A key goal was to share among the very different entities successes and challenges and to learn from each other how to navigate through the process of creating transformational change. This summative phase of the project helped to develop a better understanding of the most effective drivers of organizational and culture change at both the system/consortium level and the member institution level.
Impact of Systems and Consortia on the Change Process To ascertain the ways that change progresses in system contexts, we received an NSF-WIDER supplement in late 2012 to work with Wabash College’s Center for Inquiry and the National Association of System Heads. Through this work conducting culture audits within each system/consortium, undertaking analysis of the policy, infrastructure, budget, and decision-making attributes characteristic of each system/consortium, and through the assessment efforts of our external evaluator, we examined the environmental factors conducive to transformational change. The findings of our project—both to use the organizational structure of systems/consortia to advance UGR and to more deeply understand the strengths and weaknesses of scaling up UGR through systems and consortia—are documented in an edited volume published by Jossey-Bass in 2015 (13). In particular, we learned that system/consortial change processes exhibit distinct differences to models developed for individual campuses. As a result, the project 263
allowed us to develop a ‘Theory of Change’ model using the lens of UGR; the model articulates the conditions needed for transformative change to occur, both at the individual campus level and for a system/consortium as a whole (14). Our objective was to determine the salient reasons for why the systematic institutionalization of UGR is occurring more rapidly in some environments and not in others. Several factors conducive to transformational change were identified including:
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Having a communication strategy that keeps UGR efforts in front of member institution presidents, chief academic officers, and Boards of Trustees. Linking the expansion of UGR to national/state/consortia student success initiatives, as well as to the long-term educational impact and financial health of the system/consortium. Identifying strong campus leaders to maintain interactions among UGR advocates from the different system/consortium institutions to keep the momentum going. Making system-/consortium-wide investments in centralized activities that support UGR such as system-wide student research competitions and/or showcase events and the development of new metrics for tracking UGR and student success, both pre- and post-baccalaureate.
It is clear from our assessments that the systems and consortia were key to moving these activities forward, and their help and leadership have been instrumental in keeping UGR at the forefront of institutional and system-wide conversations (14). Our theory of change model (14) indicates that system/consortial change processes rely primarily on the system playing the role of convener, communicator, and clearinghouse for constituent member institution’s activities. Specific to UGR, they can help connect faculty interests and institutional infrastructure, measure impacts of UGR on student success, garner and deploy internal and external resources, and advocate to academic and non-academic internal and external audiences. System administrators spearheaded many of the activities that were crucial to the success of the project. A few outcomes from each of the six systems/consortia are highlighted in Table 1. Assessment of the project supports our impressions that campus teams have made considerable progress towards the implementation of robust UGR programs at their institutions (14). Our data show that almost every campus team is using what it learned from project participation to help institutionalize UGR on its campus. A large majority of the teams have informed us that the action plans developed at the workshops were proving to be useful guides for UGR implementation efforts. What many of the strategies had in common is that they required a high degree of faculty-administrator consensus on the value of UGR and a determined effort to change established academic and administrative values and procedures. 264
Table 1. Select Outcomes from the Six Participating Systems and Consortia Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges • Developed an UGR distance-mentoring project to provide student researchers with the disciplinary expertise of faculty members from across the consortium. • Established a steering committee consisting of faculty and administrators to develop a set of best practices for recognizing and rewarding faculty work in UGR mentoring. • Selected by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as an official partner in the LEAP States Initiative with a focus on continuous improvement in UGR. University of Wisconsin System • Formed the Wisconsin System Council on Undergraduate Research to increase access to and assure quality of the UGR experience at each UW System institution. • Used the UW Board of Regents to connect UGR with economic development. • Received from the Board of Regents in 2013 a five-year, $1 million annual commitment to support UGR at UW’s 2-year and 4-year undergraduate campuses and in 2014 an additional $1 million investment for student “Undergraduate Research and Discovery Grants” and a faculty “Regent Scholar Program”. Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education • Recognized UGR as a central retention strategy in the System’s completion agenda and strategic plan reviewed by the Board of Governors in January 2014. • Selected UGR as a means to demonstrate student success in the state’s performance-based funding model. City University of New York System • Sponsored a workshop on integrating research into the curriculum and launched a grant competition to seed innovations in this area. • Used the CUNY Performance Management Process to select UGR as a means to demonstrate improving student success. California State University System • Created a CSU Council to host webinars and exchange ideas, leading to the creation of central UGR offices and alignment of measurements of UGR activities. • Contributed to the development of existing system-wide initiatives that invest heavily in UGR support (e.g., CSU Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology). • Developed an online peer-reviewed journal of UGR, Journal of the CSU Scholar, providing educators and students ongoing access to system innovations. Great Lakes Colleges Association • Created the GLCA Undergraduate Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity Advisory Board to promote collaboration and offer webinars on UGR topics of broad interest (e.g., integration of research-based experiences into introductory courses)
Our work, both on this CCLI Phase 3/Wider project, and over the past twenty years shows that UGR is a pedagogical and scholarly practice that has substantial impacts on faculty, students, institutions, and in the cases described here, entire systems and consortia. A large-scale commitment to this high-impact practice can 265
pay tremendous dividends in enhancing the intellectual climates on our campuses and is a practice that can be life-changing for many students. We remain committed to assisting institutions in their quest for all of these outcomes. It is clear from our work that a long-term commitment and investment in this effort from each of the systems/consortia is essential for the success of each project.
Developing Research-Rich, Scaffolded Undergraduate STEM Curricula Over the past two decades, CUR’s work with over 600 institutions has led participating institutional teams to generate action plans outlining strategic goals to institutionalize UGR. Whereas significant and large-scale gains in building UGR-supportive practices and investments have been achieved, it is clear that some action plan goals have not been easy to achieve within a 1-2 year time span. As an example of the latter, almost without exception, one key goal described in each campus plan has been to create a more research-rich, scaffolded curriculum. Teams invariably discover the significant challenges and longtime arc needed for curricular reform, including such issues as understanding the different disciplinary cultures among STEM departments/programs; rethinking faculty workload and reward systems for both tenured and non-tenured faculty; establishing strong partnerships between faculty, students, and administrators; scaffolding curricular elements linked to student learning outcomes; and partnering with students to fundamentally change the learning process. Our current work addresses the challenge of backward-designing and implementing coordinated four-year curricula to provide all students with equitable access to the benefits of undergraduate research. With funding from the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program (15), we are conducting fundamental research on student, faculty, departmental, and disciplinary influences on the process of integrating and scaffolding curricula emphasizing discovery, inquiry, and analysis. Our project, “Integrating and Scaffolding Research into Undergraduate STEM Curricula: Probing Faculty, Student, Disciplinary, and Institutional Pathways to Transformational Change” (15), involves the partnership of the Council of Undergraduate Research with Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research to work with 24 departments (representing the disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology) at 12 institutions, two departments from each institution. Participating institutions have been recruited through a national call for applications and were selected on the basis of their demonstrated need and readiness for curricular transformation involving the integration of the components and outcomes of undergraduate research throughout a four-year curriculum. The twelve institutional partners for the CUR Transformations project are:
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Bradley University, Peoria, IL Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA Mansfield University, Mansfield, PA Radford University, Radford, VA Rice University, Houston, TX Smith College, Northampton, MA St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, MD University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ University of California–Riverside, Riverside, CA University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC
Two expert consultants are matched with each department to oversee and guide the curricular transformation process through sustained communication, annual on-site visits, and annual collaboration meetings of all project participants. To achieve a cohesive curriculum that initiates students into a culture of inquiry and research in the discipline, departments will use a backward-design approach to develop scaffolded, research-rich courses and assignments that build in deliberate ways to guide students to greater independence and ownership of their learning. Two overarching research questions will be examined: (a) What effect do student characteristics (e.g., pre-existing academic preparation, current course performance) have on student-learning experiences and outcomes in a scaffolded inquiry-driven curriculum? (b) How do different departmental approaches and distinct disciplinary cultures impact the integration of the components and outcomes of undergraduate research into the curriculum? A mixed-methods approach will be used to address these questions, with data collection methods including surveys, focus groups with students and faculty, observations and interviews with faculty and team consultants, annual progress reports, and in-depth site visits. A novel aspect of this project will be the development of both standardized and experimental questions on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE). These surveys will allow for comparison of project institutions with national results. This project will have extensive impacts beyond the 24 participating STEM departments/programs, their 12 institutions, and the hundreds of thousands of students whom they teach. The theory of change model that develops will allow a broad and diverse range of institution types and departments/disciplines (a) to assess their readiness for research-scaffolded curricula and new faculty workload and leadership models, (b) to understand the cultural change process within the context of different STEM disciplinary cultures, and (c) to take focused steps toward achieving these sustained transformations. The project will develop and broadly disseminate tools to measure the effectiveness and extent of reform and will provide key insights into its effects on student achievement and organizational and cultural change. 267
The project will fill important scholarly gaps in published knowledge on UGR and high-impact practices, thereby affording the opportunity for many researchers and practitioners to pursue new scholarly questions. Survey items developed will add to the collection of tested student and faculty engagement questions and assessment approaches and can be made available through no-/low-cost licensing to institutions or departments beyond the 24 participating units to assess student engagement and educational effectiveness in UGR. This project will also build community among participating faculty and administrative leaders within and across diverse disciplines and institutions. Our focus is on STEM disciplines, but the results of this project will be transferable to many other non-STEM disciplines, which we will share as noted above.
Acknowledgments We thank the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education for its steadfast support of UGR professional development and fundamental research on UGR’s impact, and for support of CUR’s CCLI phase 2 (#0618721), phase 3 (#0920275), and IUSE (#1625354) projects. Multitudes of people have been involved in CUR professional development workshops over the past 20 years and deserve our thanks. We would like to give particular thanks to Nancy Hensel (former Executive Officer for CUR) and to Jill Singer (Buffalo State College), who collaborated with us on the CCLI phase 2 project, and to those who originated the concept of CUR’s workshop program—Charlotte Otto and Tom Wenzel—whose vision for what was possible lives on over 20 years, 600 institutions, thousands of faculty members, and hundreds of thousands of students later.
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