(207f) Work in Progress: An Undergraduate “Introduction to Research Methods” Course for Honors Students

In an effort to improve student recruiting and retention, our institution has focused on expanding the Honor’s College experience. Within the College of Engineering and Applied Science, the goal is to focus the Honors experience on undergraduate research. Both Honor’s Colleges and undergraduate research are considered High Impact Programs (HIPs) for recruiting and retention. The aim of the Engineering College Honor’s program is to broaden research opportunities and competitiveness of student applications for summer research programs, NSF REUs, internal/external research funding applications, participation in undergraduate research conferences, and preparing 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. The new College Honor’s program is also expected to lead to a significant increase in the number of students performing undergraduate research. In an effort to improve the undergraduate research experience and achieve the above outcomes, the College will be initiating an Introduction to Research Methods course for the undergraduate Honors students as pre-requisite for undergraduate research during the Fall 2019 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 course will be broadly focused by providing a general approach to research and graduate school preparation. 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. This presentation will discuss the motivation for this work, course details, learning objectives, course schedule, and course assignments. In addition planned assessments and student outcome tracking for the course will be presented.