Before 2000, undergraduate research at Bridgewater State College occurred in an ad hoc manner across campus. After a faculty panel discussion at the end of that academic year, several administrators in attendance decided to make undergraduate research a formal part of the learning experience across the college.

“We had five people on the panel talking about the ways in which mentoring and undergraduate research had changed us as a faculty, had challenged us, and, I think most compellingly, how it changed the students. We had a student there who told the wonderful archetypal story of having come to Bridgewater with a certain intellectual horizon and now this student was applying to graduate school,” says Andrew Harris, executive assistant to the president.

After the panel, college President Adrian Tinsley “made a commitment to institutionalize what had previously been a lot of localized decisions between students and faculty, and it has taken off extraordinarily,” Harris says.

Support for undergraduate research began with a competitive summer grant program that provided stipends for students and faculty involved in undergraduate research. This was a familiar model for those who had worked with the National Science Foundation summer grant program or the NCUR-Lancy grant program for undergraduate research.

In addition to implementing a familiar model, summer is also the time that provides the most flexibility for students and faculty. “One of the things we grappled with was how to fit all the different shapes that research takes into one grant structure, because there’s a different time commitment from faculty and students at different stages of a project—depending on whether the project is lab work, performance, or archival work. The summer best provided the flexibility for faculty and students to undertake different kinds of projects. During the academic year, faculty still mentor students in research projects, but the mechanisms are harder to work. Faculty have other teaching responsibilities. Students have other course responsibilities. It’s not simply enough to say we’re going to pay you or buy out your time. Everything gets more complicated during the academic year,” Harris says.

“I would also say that when you have it in the summer, you have the opportunity to create a community of scholars that you don’t always have the opportunity or time to create during the academic year,” says Lee Torda, director of undergraduate research.

Matching faculty and students

The goal of undergraduate research is to introduce students to the methodology of the discipline. The ways that undergraduate research projects come about are “a funny mix of student interest and faculty direction,” Torda says. “Typically these students become involved by taking a course with a faculty member and then either find the faculty member compelling or the work that they are doing with the faculty member compelling. Usually there is an opening for that faculty member to say, ‘If you’re interested in pursuing this, there are opportunities on campus to do this individually or to join our project.’ There are several science projects that have been going on for several years that new undergraduates cycle through.”

Undergraduate research happens differently in different disciplines. In the natural sciences, students typically develop their projects within the scope of a faculty member’s research. This is not always so in the humanities and social sciences. “I’ve never mentored a student in the area in which I publish, and I would not expect to. That’s not the way my discipline [history] works,” Harris says. “My expectation is that the student will pursue a project and I will be able to guide them to a degree, but it’s more independently motivated, which means that my role as mentor is different from that of a mentor in chemistry.”

Bridgewater State emphasizes the mentoring process that takes place in undergraduate research, but the work that students do is true research. They are not simply acting as lab assistants. Nevertheless, undergraduate research typically does not contribute directly to faculty members’ publications. “Any campus that wants to have the discussion about whether to engage in undergraduate research has to think about what the institution will value. We’ve had faculty members say, ‘Undergraduate research doesn’t help me write an article.’ That’s often true. Undergraduate research does not always contribute to your scholarly agenda. You might learn something along the way, but that’s not going to show up in your scholarship,” Torda says.

Benefits

Currently there are approximately 200 students participating in undergraduate research at Bridgewater State. With a student body of 7,000, this is not a large number, but the experience can have a significant effect on those who participate and those who do not participate directly.

Undergraduate research is not limited to grant-funded projects. “It is promoted in lots of places now, and I think that’s a sign that it’s successful,” Harris says. “It’s a powerful, transformative, and confidence-building experience for students, many of whom came to college with a far more limited sense of their own potential of what they could accomplish. Coaxing them along and steering them in the right way changes them. For the students around them, they are exemplars. They are a sign that you don’t have to be a faculty member to talk in this way, to think in this way, to achieve in this way. It has made inroads into student culture much more broadly than just those students who participate in it. Everyone glories in those who go through this.”

Bridgewater State is in the process of initiating a comprehensive assessment plan for the undergraduate research program to gauge the effects it has had on students.

“Other institutions have found that undergraduate research, like other forms of engaged student learning, is one of those things that has a powerful positive correlation with student retention, success, and time to degree. This is why institutions everywhere are promoting it,” Harris says.

However, much of the support for undergraduate research is rhetorical, Torda says. “The rhetoric around undergraduate research has often far outpaced actual institutional support, because I don’t know that everyone understands the vast commitment it is.”

Administrative support

Undergraduate research requires a lot of individual mentoring, which makes it quite expensive. “For every faculty member you have engaged in undergraduate research, at a certain point that faculty member is teaching one or two students rather than a class of thirty. How are you going to deliver the undergraduate major to the students who do not engage in undergraduate research? What space on campus do you have to do this work? Do you have enough teachers to do undergraduate research? Those are pretty hardcore institutional questions. No small group or even a director can control that. It requires a huge institutional buy-in,” Harris says.

Certainly buying faculty time for participation is a start, but it is not enough to encourage most faculty to engage in undergraduate research. “We’re always trying to increase the way we validate faculty mentoring at every level. I would say that the way in which we value faculty mentoring during the summer research grant program is reasonably good. We validate that in a way that faculty find equitable. One of the great frontiers for us is validating it better during the academic year. I say validation because aside from buying people’s time to engage in this activity, the really complicated issue is how you factor mentoring into tenure and promotion and post-tenure review,” Harris says.

Because the process and products of undergraduate research are different in different disciplines, the way it counts will vary as well. This is an ongoing issue that Bridgewater State has yet to resolve. “However we resolve this, it will be a flexible resolution. In many ways the reason that this is a hard conversation—and I don’t know anybody for whom this has been an easy conversation—is because I think everybody thinks they understand how to talk about evaluating the role of teaching and the role of scholarship within whatever structure exists at their institution. Undergraduate research is mercurial in that it fits into many categories. The important thing is to not focus on the category. If you focus on the category, you’ll get people saying, ‘If it counts only as one’s own research, then you’re writing off three-fourths of the faculty. You can’t just do that kind of work with an undergraduate.’ If you say it counts only as teaching, you have to challenge a lot of people’s sense that in the academic hierarchy of professional goals, teaching is seen as less valuable than research. In many ways undergraduate research runs directly into that false assumption because this kind of transformation is what we were planted in this soil to do. It is very much why people teach here and why students come here.”

Send your comments to partingshot@magnapubs.com.

Contact Andrew Harris at a1harris@bridgew.edu and Lee Torda at ltorda@bridgew.edu

This article first appeared in Magna Publications' newsletter Academic Leader. If you are an academic dean, provost, academic vice-president, department chair/head or have any role in academic leadership, then Academic Leader is for you! But don't take our word for it--try it free for 3-months and make the decision for yourself!