Talk About Teaching
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Undergraduate Research Experience
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by Robert Rescorla
How did James Joyce's historical and literary context affect the
style of his writing? What is the role of second messenger systems in
storing human memories? How have the different patterns of immigration
affected assimilation of groups into American society? Questions of this
sort deeply engage Penn's faculty. We spend enormous amounts of time and
energy formulating, analyzing, and drawing conclusions about such
questions. And we derive considerable intellectual stimulation and
pleasure from the effort. An ideal undergraduate program would
systematically engage our students in such activities, exposing them to
the excitement of the enterprise and showing them this aspect of our own
lives.
There are many educational reasons to embed undergraduate
education in the context of a research university. But surely one of the
strongest is the opportunity that a University setting can provide for
undergraduates themselves to participate in research. For many students
such opportunities can be the most rewarding experiences of their
undergraduate careers.
The goal of giving undergraduate students research experience is
not to press them into being premature graduate students. Rather, to my
mind, there are three goals that are well served by this kind of
experience. First, it helps students better appreciate the nature of
knowledge. It is in the attempt to add to our knowledge that one really
comes to understand what it is to know something. One must confront the
methodological and conceptual issues surrounding the nature of knowledge
in a given discipline. This cannot help but give one new respect for
knowledge as well as a healthy skepticism for its origins and
permanence. Second, working through the steps of doing research in any
field helps sharpen analytic and communication skills. Such skills will
generalize to new domains and enable our students to reason well about
the new problems they will face in the future. Third, there is an
excitement about doing research which is difficult to match. It is a
heady experience to be the first to know something, whether it is a fact
about the physical world, a new understanding of a piece of art or
literature, or an novel appreciation of a social interaction. It is the
kind of experience that motivates our faculty; and it is the kind of
experience that will excite our undergraduates, helping to instill a
love of learning.
Of course, research means different things in different
disciplines. So what goals can we set for the research experiences that
we offer our students? One formulation is that we should try to give our
students the experience of creating the same sort of product as they are
asked to read and learn about in their courses, the sort of product that
their professors generate in their own research. A typical result of a
students' researches would be a substantial written document that
advances a thesis and conducts an analysis of that thesis by one or more
of the methodologies accepted in the discipline. In some disciplines the
appropriate methodology would involve empirical techniques, in others
theoretical work, perhaps of a quantitative sort, whereas in others it
would involve bringing to bear the writings of previous thinkers in the
field. But we can ask students to engage in the kind of activity that we
as faculty members spend our own time doing. This will give students an
enriching experience. But of equal importance, it will create a better
understanding of what the faculty do and why they do it.
But to what degree is such a goal really achievable at a
university like Penn? What means do we have for involving undergraduates
in research? Of course, the most familiar model is that of the
independent study course, in which students work in a one-on-one manner
with faculty mentors. Penn already provides abundant opportunities for
independent study. Approximately one-fourth of students in the College
avail themselves of those opportunities, under the guidance of faculty
in the College and in several of the other schools of the University.
(Indeed, the topics listed at the beginning of this essay include
undergraduate independent study projects funded by the College Alumni
Society.) Clearly, one of Penn's distinctive features is the flexibility
that it provides for undergraduates to do research with faculty in
graduate and professional schools. A related, but educationally less
well-articulated, opportunity is often provided by work study programs.
Many College students get their first entry into research through their
work study positions. We certainly need to encourage students to take
advantage of these opportunities.
But it is clear that engaging all undergraduates in research
through the means of independent study courses would overtax our
already-stretched faculty resources. Moreover, in some disciplines
students may need more educational background than can reasonably be
given at the undergraduate level to prepare them for this sort of work.
So we must look for other models by which we can give research
experience. Certainly what is successful will vary by discipline, but
one model that seems to work well in some of the social and natural
sciences is a seminar-sized course in which small groups of students
collaborate on research projects. For instance, in recent years the
Psychology Department has created a set of "Research Experience" courses
and required all of its majors to take at least one. The goal of these
courses is to expose students to the full process of doing research in
psychology. Students work with faculty members to formulate a research
question, familiarize themselves with the relevant extant literature,
design an empirical study intended to address that question, collect (or
locate) the data themselves, and conduct an analysis of those data. They
then work either collaboratively or individually to produce a written
document describing their work in the format that would be expected of a
professional publication, and they give oral presentations of their work
to the peers in their class. This model can be conducted with a wide
variety of different contents ranging from clinical and social
psychology to behavioral neuroscience.
By working in groups of 3 or 4, students get the experience of
doing front line research on questions of their own devising, but
without the attendant cost in faculty time of individual research
projects. Equally importantly, by working in groups, the students gain
other educationally valuable experiences. For instance, they develop the
skills involved in collaborative work toward a common goal. They come to
view each other as intellectual resources. Perhaps most important of
all, they carry intellectual questions outside of the classroom,
challenging each other and learning from each other in settings not
dominated by the presence of a faculty member. Exit interviews conducted
by the Psychology Department suggest that their students see this sort
of experience as one of the highlights of their undergraduate
experience. Penn's students are not alone in holding this view. The
Light Report, evaluating the assessment seminars at Harvard, asked
recent graduates to characterize the intellectual experiences that were
seminal for them. By far the most frequently identified experience was
one in which a small group of students worked closely with a faculty
member in pursuit of a common intellectual goal.
How far one can generalize such a model to other disciplines
remains to be seen. Several other College departments have similar
courses, but their implementation may prove difficult in some fields.
Indeed, in some disciplines it may be hard for a department to provide
any research experiences for its majors. Such disciplines may have to
look to other departments, or to the College or University more
generally, to provide research opportunities for their majors. For
instance, Mathematics already sees some of its majors gaining research
experience in social and natural science departments.
But clearly one of the challenges we face as we contemplate
strengthening the undergraduate experience at Penn is devising new ways
of bringing research experience into the curriculum. Successfully doing
so can be expected not only to enrich the experience of our
undergraduates but also to enliven the scholarly and research activities
of our faculty. Undergraduate research experience is one of the places
that we can see the synergy between the scholarly and teaching
components of faculty lives, components which are all too frequently
characterized as competing with each other.
This article, third in a series developed by the Lindback Society and
the College of Arts and Sciences, is by the SAS Associate Dean for
Undergraduate Education. Dr. Rescorla is also professor of psychology
and Director of the College.
Almanac
Volume 41, Number 4
December 6, 1994
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