Engagement of one to a few students with a supervising faculty member around a primary research theme chosen by the faculty member. This format may take place with students enrolled in an appropriate independent research course OR may be hired into a paid research position.
Benefits:
- Progress of students can be closely monitored and the stages to independence carefully gauged.
- Feedback can occur frequently.
- Positive impact for both mentor and mentee.
- Flexible scheduling of research effort.
Challenges:
- Faculty time commitment is large for a relatively small number of students.
- Student may be required to function with a lot of independence.
Student-initiated research that may, or may not, fall within the faculty’s area of expertise. Faculty supervises and guides the student’s research project. Students engaging in this format should be enrolled in an independent research or project course. This may be appealing to students seeking to complete a Majors-Honors-related project.
Benefits:
- Student has full ownership of the project.
- Student engages in project from conception to dissemination, experiencing every aspect of the research process.
- Faculty may be introduced to new subject leading to continued learning, new lines of research, or new approaches to or understanding of their current work.
- Faculty may be drawn into new collaborations that are typically interdisciplinary.
Challenges:
- Student persistence and success are more diminished in this approach.
- Student interest may be far removed from faculty research and expertise.
- Takes faculty time away from ongoing research.
A new line of inquiry is opened based on the mutual interest of the student and faculty member. This model should be initiated with the student enrolled in an independent research or project course but, dependent upon progress, could evolve into a paid role as well.
Benefits:
- Research conducted in an area that both the student and faculty member are interested in.
- Develops skills useful in collaborative and interdisciplinary research.
- Can often lead to new insights and lines of research by drawing upon multiple fields.
Challenges:
- Often develops slowly.
- Student persistence and resilience may diminish when engaging in a new research project.
Students collaborate on a research project where they may split up the responsibilities/duties of a project or share them. This format may be carried out with students engaged in independent research/project sections (assuming that each has a somewhat unique component of the overall project), in paid positions, or as part of a research course (see below).
Benefits:
- Shares the workload and practices teamwork skills.
- Efficient when long experiments or procedures are essential but cannot reasonably be performed by one individual.
- Expands opportunities to more students.
Challenges:
- Student preparedness and commitment can vary significantly amongst team members.
- Challenges associated with a mix of personalities and viewpoints.
- Shared workload issues – making sure it is even and everyone is meeting responsibilities and deadlines.
Research Course
A limited number of students enrolled in a course that meets at a defined time. The focus of the course is research (rather than embedded research like the CURE model described in the next section). A supervising faculty member, or small faculty member team, teaches the course and supervises the work. These courses often include instruction in general and discipline-specific research methodology.
Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE)
These course-based experiences bring current, relevant research into the classroom and laboratory environment and offer advantages over traditional lab courses and research internships. Because they are course-based, they involve many students in research at one time, and all students who enroll in a course are able to participate. This provides an economy of scale generally not possible with the traditional faculty-mentored research model. While CUREs developed out of the life and physical sciences, there are many examples of their use in social sciences as well.
Benefits:
- Many successful examples across a variety of disciplines exist in the literature.
- Allows faculty members to use upper-level specialized courses with labs of a dozen or more students as venues for conducting original research within their focus area.
- Expands opportunity for students to engage in research.
Challenges:
- Faculty workload concerns – supervising more students can often lead to more surprises, challenges, and failures.