Faculty member perspectives and practices regarding undergraduate research.

Abstract

One recent response to persistent concerns about the quality of undergraduate education at research universities has been to emphasize the importance of undergraduate research. Although literature addresses the impact of participation on undergraduates, little is known about faculty involvement. Unexplored questions include: Why do faculty members choose to collaborate with undergraduate students in doing research? How do they structure these experiences, and view their meaning or importance? How do faculty views and practices vary by selected faculty attributes? These questions were addressed through an exploratory qualitative study with a sample of thirty faculty members at one Midwestern research university, who were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol. Transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory and phenomenological techniques. Grounded theory analysis yielded a model of undergraduate research collaboration comprised of three stages and four phases. Stages represented structural conditions within collaboration (considering collaboration, collaborating, and culminating collaboration), and phases illustrated progression among the stages, based on faculty members' goal orientations, perceptions, decision-making, and actions (e.g., assessing student and project fit leading to collaboration commitment, and characterizing previous collaborations leading to faculty outcomes). Phenomenological analysis revealed four common components of undergraduate research collaborations---research, faculty, students, research others, and developed six typologies from recurrent patterns of variation among these components: science apprenticeship, intellectual ownership, life mentorship, community stewardship, academic sponsorship, and research assistantship. By extracting essential elements from these descriptions and categorizations, a definition of undergraduate research collaboration was developed. Specifically, from faculty perspectives, it is a functional partnership between an undergraduate student and a faculty member in which both are directly and actively involved in planning and/or executing a project of inquiry drawn from a disciplinary or interdisciplinary focus. Integration of these findings showed how phenomenological elements operate similarly and uniquely within the grounded theory stage/phase model. Further research questions posed by the study addressed ways to refine the preliminary model of undergraduate research collaboration. Practice implications outlined how faculty perspectives might be used to enhance individual research collaborations and improve research program effectiveness.