Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) are an important component of undergraduate STEM programs. The broad goals of UREs are to improve understanding of scientific content, develop knowledge of and skills in scientific practices, build an understanding of the nature of science, and improve confidence for doing science. Although students spend considerable time in UREs, there has been little direct assessment of the learning gains that students make during these experiences. Most empirical investigations of UREs rely primarily on self-report surveys or interviews to document learning outcomes and do not directly assess student mastery of scientific content or practices. We are drawing on the Knowledge Integration framework to develop and test two instruments to assess how students understand and connect the components of their research projects, including scientific content, research questions, experimental design, data analysis, and interpretation of results. One instrument is comprised of a detailed observation protocol to be used at scientific poster presentations and the second instrument is a set of weekly journal reflections that can be administered to students at a variety of time points during their UREs. Corresponding Knowledge Integration scoring guides for each of these instruments have been developed. In preliminary investigations, these instruments have been able to capture a clear range of ability among different students and have begun to identify ways in which different students make connections within and between components of the research process. We are using these instruments to characterize the trajectory of students as they progress from novice to more advanced researchers during multi-year research projects in faculty laboratories. The development of the assessment instruments and preliminary data will be discussed.

Investigation of learning outcomes from undergraduate research experiences

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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