Comprehensive Research Experience for Undergraduates

The Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) has been shown to positively influence the academic and professional performance of participants. The development of such programs has not been uniform throughout the past few decades. Nonetheless, hallmark characteristics are common between successful programs, which include: 1) meaningful research experience; 2) challenging yet welcoming environment with proper social network; 3) mentorship by faculty members and graduate students; and 4) well-rounded experience through supplemental workshops and seminars. Considering previous research, the Translational Application of Nanoscale Multiferroic Systems (TANMS) research center designed, implemented and assessed a comprehensive REU program to engage students in research during both the academic year and summer months. TANMS’s REU is an eight-week research experience for undergraduates from multiple 4-year universities and community colleges. The program components include research in one of TANMS laboratories, seminars on ethics and diversity, workshops on entrepreneurship, and social events. These activities are woven into an experience to instill sixteen specific skills that were grouped into five core categories: I) communication (2 skills); II) engineering success (2 skills); III) business and market savvy (3 skills); IV) technical (5 skills); and V) multicultural and interpersonal (4 skills). The inclusion of these skills was based on the objectives of National Science Foundation’s REU and ERC programs, the ‘Engineer 2020’ report from the National Academy of Engineers, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers ‘Vision 2030’ report. TANMS’s Industry Advisory Board reviewed, approved, and ranked the relevance and importance of each skill. After each research experience, i.e. 8-week program, students completed electronic surveys and either in-person or phone interviews, which were administered by an independent evaluator. The assessment protocol was reviewed and approved by Institutional Review Boards on each campus. Results are based on a sample of 51 undergraduate students from the first two years of assessment (participation rates of 71.4% and 81.8%, respectively). Findings suggest substantial increase in students’ engineering knowledge and skills, with the overwhelming majority of participants indicating that they were “Satisfied or Very Satisfied” with TANMS REU program. Introduction and background Engineering and scientific research is the bloodline to improve and maintain the global competitiveness of the United States. Traditionally, the throughput of research is accomplished by academic faculty and postgraduate students. However, in the past few decades, there has been a keen effort to engage undergraduate and community college students in research to help advance the-state-of-the-art and to create a sustainable pipeline to graduate schools. Moreover, the shift in the demographics, based on recent census data, calls for the need to diversify the workforce by attracting and training underrepresented minority groups into engineering and science. Thus, the involvement of undergraduates in research has been supported by federal, state and local governments as well as by industry, since the shortage of domestic and diverse students in graduate school pipeline threatens the economic and technological advances of the United States. For example, the program highlighted in this paper is supported by the National Science Foundation, which mandates the expansion of: “student participation in all kinds of research – both disciplinary and interdisciplinary – encompassing efforts by individual investigators, groups, centers, national facilities, and others” [1]. Therefore, the goal is the integration of research and education to provide students superior undergraduate education [1]. In addition to NSF efforts, universities have long recognized the importance of training students in research early in their academic careers as doing so fosters academic preparation and motivation to attend graduate school [2]. Towards those ends, and considering the demographic composition of engineering and other technical fields compared to the United States at large, universities have created educational centers and programs to increase the participation of undergraduates— particularly underrepresented minority (URM) groups and women—in scientific research. The REU described in this paper is designed based on research of best practices as well as the Center’s prior experience to draw and retain undergraduates (emphasizing URM and women) in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and careers. Additionally, the program is aligned with the Center’s strategic education focus: “to develop the next generation of diverse and creative engineers to lead the new, global industry based upon innovative multiferroics technologies.” Prior research in existing and successful minority programs such as Minority Engineering Program [2] and Meyerhoff Program at University of Maryland Baltimore County [3–5] suggests that the Center’s REU program design is based on strong scientific foundations and poised to positively impact undergraduate educational experience while diversifying the future workforce. Specifically, the Minority Engineering Program (MEP) was successful in increasing the retention rate of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans students in engineering more than twofold in comparison to retention rate of students from the same ethnic groups who were not involved in MEP over the same period [2]. MEP has five important objectives, which enabled it to achieve such remarkable results. The MEP objectives are: Community Building, Academic Survival Skills, Personal Development, Professional Development, and Integration into College and University [3–5]. The MEP initiative was established in the early 1970s in response to a challenge set forth by the industry “to take bold, innovative, all-out action to increase the supply of minority engineering graduate by 10or 15-fold, and to get it done within the decade” [6]. Nonetheless four decades later, our nation’s higher education institutes have largely failed to deliver an innovative solution to this challenge. The REU program reported herein is offering a path-forward to address this problem. Interestingly, the Meyerhoff program, established almost a decade after MEP, has analogous objectives to MEP, which are: Academic and social integration, Knowledge and skill development, Support and motivation, and Monitoring and advising. Their approach to achieve these objectives consists of five-step plan: 1) recruiting a substantial pool of high-achieving minority students with interests in math and science who are most likely to be retained in the scientific pipeline; 2) offering merit-based financial support; 3) providing an orientation program for incoming freshmen; 4) recruiting the most active research faculty to work with the students (it takes a scientist to train a scientist); and 5) involving the students in scientific research projects as early as possible, so that they can be engaged through the excitement of discovery [3– 5]. The similarities between the two programs suggest the importance of their objectives and approach in the design and implementation of any URM-based program. Additionally, over the past three decades, many studies have investigated the structure and impact of engaging undergraduate students in meaningful and rewarding research experiences. Some studies reported on the effectiveness of such research programs on attracting underrepresented and underserved minorities as well as women to attain STEM undergraduate and graduate degrees. These studies provided evidence of increased interest in the specific discipline in which students performed their research [7–11], increased grit to continue their degrees [8,12,13], improved research skills [7–9,14], improved overall skills [8,9,14,15], and increased likelihood of pursuing graduate school in STEM [7–9,14,15]. It is important to note that characteristics common to the REU experiences studied in the above research are: 1) meaningful research project; 2) challenging yet welcoming environment with proper social network; 3) mentorship by faculty members as well as graduate students; and 4) well-rounded experience through supplemental seminars and workshops. It is also worth noting that these characteristics are analogous to those stated above for MEP and Meyerhoff programs [2–5]. Other research has focused on the impact of REU sites as well as other research experiences on underrepresented minority students and women [16–24]. For these groups, connecting the research experience to societal implications and promoting positive connections between students and the research community proved important [25]. In short, the impact of undergraduate research experience is tremendous on undergraduate students, graduate mentors, and faculty members. In all, evidence-based practices from previous successful programs and published research indicate the importance of integration of undergraduates, specially underrepresented and underserved minority groups, in research to combat challenges to matriculation, retention, graduation, and enrollment in graduate school.