Undergraduate Research Surges, Despite Uncertainties Over Best Practices

In just a few months, Rachael G. Nutt’s undergraduate thesis at the University of Vermont — on menstruation and fertility in Italian Renaissance art — has already been downloaded more than 400 times.

Her 70-page paper helps explain such mysteries as why the artists painted urinating boys on wedding gifts. (It’s one of many symbols, Ms. Nutt concluded, thought to have encouraged fertility.)

The thesis — and its unexpectedly strong public reception — is also part of a new era of undergraduate research that’s helping colleges and universities understand exactly what such early-stage scholars should be taught, and be expected to accomplish.

At the undergraduate level, “it’s pretty extraordinary to have this experience,” said Ms. Nutt’s faculty adviser, Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, a professor of art history.

Initially a phenomenon found mostly at small, elite private institutions, undergraduate research has expanded in the last couple of decades to hundreds of colleges of all sizes and types.

Still elusive, however, is good information on how best to shape those programs, assess their benefits, and repeat their successes. Just the number of undergraduate research programs is tough to estimate.

“This evolution is happening so quickly,” said Elizabeth L. Ambos, executive officer of the Council on Undergraduate Research, “it’s hard to measure.”

One of the clearest shifts has been the expansion of undergraduate research from its origins in the hard sciences to a variety of social sciences, Ms. Ambos said. In just a decade, the council has formed an arts-and-humanities division that now amounts to more than 1,000 people, or about 10 percent of its overall membership, she said.

Across the fields, there are some relatively basic ideas on how best to proceed. For students working in a professor’s lab, the benefit appears greater when the students participate in decisions and strategies rather than just perform technical functions.

Similarly, in classroom-based labs, students benefit when they design and carry out a relatively open-ended inquiry, rather than just repeat lab experiments that have been done thousands of times before.

A Work in Progress

Beyond that, however, finding the best features and combinations of experiences, and the mix of structures and incentives for achieving those experiences, still remains very much a work in progress at many institutions. That’s true for both the lab-based sciences and the more writing-intensive social sciences.

Those kinds of assessments just haven’t been enough of a priority among colleges and universities, even as those institutions, secondary schools, and employers have made clear the value they place in general on “high impact” educational practices, several experts said.

They include members of a National Academies panel that spent the last two years studying undergraduate research. Its final report, in February, struggled to offer firm advice, saying colleges should make much greater efforts to tally what research opportunities they were offering their undergraduates and to identify what works.

That lack of data on undergraduate research “was the challenge we had,” said the chairman of the National Academies panel, James M. Gentile, an emeritus dean and professor of biology at Hope College, in Michigan.

A big part of the problem, said George D. Kuh, founding director of the National Survey of Student Engagement, is that undergraduate research appears too diverse to study it effectively on a national scale.

“It would be a massive, massive undertaking,” said Mr. Kuh, an emeritus professor of higher education at Indiana University at Bloomington, and “there doesn’t seem to be the will or number of dollars to do it.”

The best alternatives for now are the various anecdotal successes in specific fields and situations, offering clues to what may be worth repeating.

They include California State University at Los Angeles, the nation’s largest producer of Hispanic scientists who later earn science doctorates, among institutions that don’t offer doctorates themselves. With students who typically have to work side jobs to support themselves and their families, the Los Angeles program works primarily by offering undergraduates small annual stipends, between about $3,000 and $12,000 and financed with federal grant money, so they have time to work in research labs.

Formal classroom-based research instruction on the Cal State campus is “pretty light,” said the program’s director, Carlos G. Gutierrez, a professor of chemistry. Instead, he said, the students work in faculty labs year-round, aiding a professor’s projects and pursuing some of their own ideas. Their skills are bolstered by a series of training workshops, with a heavy emphasis on writing skills.

That model leads to about 10 to 12 alumni doctorates a year — enough to make the university the leader in Hispanic scientists. Because of the lab-based structure, however, such training can reach only a few hundred of the institution’s 28,000 students, Mr. Gutierrez conceded.

That capacity problem is a nationwide issue. Even as undergraduate research booms, the share of American undergraduates directly performing research with a faculty member has held steady for the past five years, at about 23 percent, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement.

Real-World Benefits

Instead, many institutions are emphasizing classroom-based models. Some curricula are specific to institutions and departments, while others are widely shared. One of the most popular is Sea-Phages, a decade-old project at about 120 institutions where freshmen dig for microscopic organisms in soil, identify and examine them, and then report their findings to the broad scientific community.

A new three-year assessment of Sea-Phages is nearly complete, and its message is upbeat, especially as it concerns the program’s ability to encourage students in all racial, ethnic, and gender groups to persist in the hard sciences.

As compared to traditional undergraduate lab courses, Sea-Phages appears to produce a broad 10-percent gain in various psychological attitudes and behaviors associated with professional scientists, said the assessment’s director, David I. Hanauer, a professor of English and applied linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Sea-Phages also has real-world scientific benefit, Mr. Hanauer said. Participating undergraduates have identified at least 1,400 bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, which have been part of some 70 published scientific papers, he said.

That question of demonstrating a wider scientific benefit is an important consideration for some advocates of undergraduate research, though a minor point or even a distraction to others.

One popular measure of that benefit involves the growing number of online university-based repositories for showing off student work. A major database covering 500 colleges and universities has added nearly four million undergraduate publications this year, up from fewer than one million in 2012. And those publications appear to be getting noticed, with an average of 150 downloads per paper from fewer than 100 in 2012, according to the data-services provider bepress, which helps universities create the web portals.

Undergraduate Success
Average downloads per undergraduate publication, 2012 to 2017, from 500 university repositories hosted by the data-services provider bepress, compared with average downloads from repositories of non-undergraduate work.

But the significance of downloads is unclear, as scientific citation is a more established method of attributing scientific credit, acknowledged Casey Busher, a spokeswoman for bepress. Nevertheless, an accumulation of examples suggests the fledgling practice of publishing undergraduate theses, combined with university policies to accept only top papers for public display, is leading students to sharpen their approaches.

Public posting of theses “gives you a little more sense of responsibility for what you’ve written,” said Ms. Di Dio, who advised Ms. Nutt during her yearlong work on fertility and art. The experience, Ms. Nutt said, helped her hone her research and writing skills, and be more competitive in her pursuit of a master’s degree in Italian Renaissance art at Syracuse University and its satellite location in Florence, Italy.

Pros and Cons of Publication

Even so, nonpublication might carry even greater significance. Another Vermont student, Katherine Ford, devoted her 2015 undergraduate thesis to an analysis of gender and sexuality aesthetics in Andy Warhol films. Now a graduate student pursuing a master’s in art history at Bryn Mawr College, Ms. Ford wisely asked that her thesis not be posted immediately because the findings, Ms. Di Dio said, deserved Ms. Ford’s expansion for a wider audience.

It’s an example, Ms. Di Dio said, of undergraduates’ becoming more and more aware of the full scientific experience, including recognizing the pros and cons of publication, such as possible limits on future use of the work.

Some training benefits of undergraduate publication seem clear, said Mr. Gutierrez at Cal State-Los Angeles. But he said he avoids it with his students because he’s not sure their work would add much of real value to the professional scientific literature. “I haven’t found any good data that says that undergraduate-research journals are being cited by other investigators,” he said.

One of the nation’s top advocates of using scientific analysis to improve curricula, the Nobel laureate Carl E. Wieman, is among those frustrated by the failure to better understand the undergraduate research experience.

Studies to date have largely evaluated the effect of undergraduate research on student attitudes and career plans, “but little on what students are actually learning and why,” said Mr. Wieman, a professor of physics and of education at Stanford University. Even the studies on attitudes are suspect, he said, because undergraduates in research programs often arrive with favorable attitudes toward science.

For both lab-based and classroom-based models, he said, key challenges center on giving students the right mix of guidance and autonomy. Few faculty members seem able to get it right, Mr. Wieman said. “Even the best often struggle with the challenge,” he said, “so typically only a very small number of faculty ever teach such courses.”

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.