It is well established that access to undergraduate research experiences is critical for retaining students pursuing STEM careers. In many cases there are not enough traditional undergraduate research opportunities to accommodate all interested students. Alternatives to traditional undergraduate research experiences such as course based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are one example of alternative research experiences which are important for engaging large numbers of undergraduates in research. These types of opportunities represent only a subset of possible research-based programs which can enrich the undergraduate experience. Over the past 5 years we have run an alternative CURE-like program which we have denoted research-group-led undergraduate research program (GURP). The idea here is to engage ~20 first-year undergraduate students in a course-like research program using pre-collected state-of-the-art research data sets. In the course, students are introduced to the basics of literature research, data analysis techniques, and an introduction to the specifics of the data they will be working with. Next, they are given an open ended pre-collected data set and given an opportunity to develop hypotheses, test their hypotheses and propose follow-up experiments. Students in the courses are exposed to modern scientific analysis tool such as Python, MATLAB, and various image analysis software. In this talk we will discuss the types of research data sets which we have used for the multiple iterations of the course, including <i>in-situ</i> transmission electron microscopy datasets, results from robotic synthesis experiments, and computational data hosted on the materials project database. Next, we will discuss the outcomes of the program. We found that this model is scalable, robust, and adaptable to different implementations while producing consistent and positive learning outcomes for students. We will also discuss the program's adaptation to partially and fully remote implementations of the course, suggesting opportunities for scaling beyond a group’s home institution. Finally, we will discuss a data repository we have curated where several example datasets and course plans are freely available for the community to implement similar programs. We believe that GURP programs can be effective in a variety of research disciplines and hope that they can become a tool to increase interest and build communities for young researchers.

Research group-led undergraduate research programs: A platform for increasing access to undergraduate research experiences

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ACS Fall 2022

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