(190g) Developing and Delivering an Undergraduate “Introduction to Research Methods” Course for Honors Students: Lessons Learned

Our institution has focused on expanding the Honor’s College experience in an effort to improve student recruiting and retention. Within the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS), the goal is to focus the Honors experience on undergraduate research. Undergraduate research is considered a High Impact Program (HIPs) for recruiting and retention. The aims of the CEAS Honor’s program are to 1) broaden research opportunities, 2) improve competitiveness of student applications for summer research programs, NSF REUs, internal/external research funding applications, 3) increase participation in undergraduate research conferences, and 4) prepare the students for graduate school. Historically, many students have received credit for completing undergraduate research, but this is often a “stand-alone” course with no additional preparation and ill-defined outcomes. For this course, the research is strongly dependent on the research lab and research advisor. The new College Honor’s program is also expected to lead to a significant increase in the number of students performing undergraduate research. Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of undergraduate research suggests a group mentoring approach. This will empower the students to take ownership of their research experience. In an effort to improve the undergraduate research experience and achieve the above outcomes, the CEAS initiated an “Introduction to Research Methods” course for the undergraduate Honors students as pre-requisite for undergraduate research during the Spring 2020 semester.

The goal of this course is to group mentor the students on many common research topics in advance of them entering the laboratory and performing research. This should reduce the required mentoring load of the research advisor and also lead to above desired outcomes. The Research Methods course will be broadly focused by providing a general approach to research and graduate school preparation appropriate for all majors in the Engineering College. Alternative approaches from the literature that are used to teach students how to conduct research will be compared and contrasted. Course topics will include: finding a research mentor, literature search skills, using the scientific method for approaching a research problem, developing a research methodology, research ethics, laboratory safety, writing a funding proposal, delivering a research presentation, and selecting and applying for graduate school. The motivation for this work, course details, learning objectives, course schedule, and course assignments will be presented. Assessments and student outcome tracking for the course will be discussed. Experiences, outcomes, feedback, and lessons learned from the initial offering of this course will be presented.