Exploring the Development of Undergraduate Research Experience

This paper describes a multi-year experiential reflection process examining the development of research awareness and integration for an undergraduate industrial engineering student. As a sophomore, I approached the faculty member in order to gain experience in an interdisciplinary human factors and systems engineering context. Because the explicit research emphasis of the faculty member’s lab is on development and sharing of expertise, information, and knowledge, the student’s learning of the research process represented an interesting context for focusing the student’s experience. Thus, one aspect of the student’s learning focused on tacit knowledge management and event-based knowledge development in the form of a student progressing through the undergraduate level of school while participating in a research lab. There are multiple multi-scale dynamic models that must be evaluated in order to create an effective process simulation of student learning from an expertise development context. Different perspectives, including the student as the system; the student as a product who is input to, and then transformed by, the “research lab-as-system”; or the student as a functioning component of the research lab system. In each model, experience versus expertise is evaluated through reflective case studies at multiple points along a learning curve. This allows a comparison of explicit, implicit, and tacit learning and to analyze at what point the student begins to think beyond the textbook with less of a process based mindset and more of an event based mindset. A learning-curve simulation of the student could be used to evaluate the rate at which the student becomes better at tasks. A social dynamics simulation addresses how different situations, such as human-human interaction or cultural learning, affect the student’s progress and perceived efficacy of learning and laboratory participation. Looking at tacit knowledge management from the viewpoint of a student developing through the research lab process shows helps to elaborate different facets of contextualized learning when trying to develop engineering experience, expertise, and integration.