Promoting Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Humanities Research: A Case for the Continuous Course Lab

Moreno Valley College, a two-year community college in Southern California, experiences an annual migration of cliff swallows. The presence of these birds inspired the development of the undergraduate research program Flying with Swallows. The assessment of the project indicated significant increases in qualitative student outcomes such as inspiration or global awareness and in the retention and success rates as compared to nonparticipating courses in the project. The lessons learned from designing, developing, and administering the project for five years are provided as a model adaptable to other institutions, with the following elements: research topic, goals and objectives, faculty, intra- and extra-curricular activities, collaboration, administrative support, assessment, dissemination, and sustainability. The data from Flying with Swallows support each element of the model.

Using a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) model of education, an English composition instructor designed an honors section of first-year composition to evaluate current best practices in the field of teaching writing to STEM undergraduates. The students, all first-year engineering majors, conducted guided research on best practices in teaching writing at STEM universities, created an in-class activity based on their findings that could be used in their own or other first-year composition classes, tested each other’s activities in small groups, and gave feedback on the activities themselves and the theories behind the best practices. The article presents an overview of the course and its objectives; summarizes the students’ activity designs, results, and conclusions; and concludes with student feedback and lessons learned.

Limiting the interpretation of “undergraduate research” to fields in the life, physical, and behavioral sciences has hampered understanding of its effects on students, faculty and institutions through campus-wide programs that support students creating original knowledge within their fields. At Florida Southern College, each academic discipline combines creativity, research, and scholarship uniquely, as students move from roles as receivers of information to emerging independent scholars, artists, and researchers. Commonalities across academic disciplines need to be maximized so that inclusive assessment instruments and evaluation plans can be developed to measure how academic programs improve student skills related to original inquiry.

The authors have developed a set of undergraduate research learning outcomes that address the traditions of research and mentoring across campus. Achievement of these outcomes is assessed at annual, institution-wide, undergraduate research events by employing a poster presentation evaluation rubric and deploying graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty as ad hoc raters. Between April 2018 and April 2019, 2,721 rubrics evaluating 803 undergraduate research posters by 436 raters were collected. Students participating in the one-semester funded and mentored undergraduate research program performed significantly higher on all four quantified learning outcomes than did nonparticipants. It was further found that disciplines exhibited different profiles of relative strength and weakness with respect to the various learning outcomes. Together, these findings inform future programmatic decision-making at the institution.

Undergraduate research has been shown to provide numerous benefits to students. In recent years an effort to scale the experience has led to development of course-based undergraduate research that often focuses on data collection or analysis. This article describes the design of a mentoring course-based undergraduate research experience (M-CURE) that focuses on the publication and career growth aspects of the research experience. A survey of students who completed the course indicated that they appreciated both the publication and mentoring facets of the course. The first three cohorts of the M-CURE course have resulted in 83 percent of students with a viable paper for publication. Eighty-one percent of the students indicated that they were extremely or somewhat likely to attend graduate programs in the next five years.

To assess what questions are already answered and what still needs to be discovered about the high-impact practice of undergraduate research (UR), the authors conducted a mixed-methods study, including a systematic analysis of literature that assessed the impact of UR, and interviewed faculty and administrators actively engaged in UR. Findings demonstrated that most studies on UR have focused on STEM fields and student outcomes. Fewer studies have examined other disciplines or other outcomes such as the impact of UR on faculty or institution. Despite ample research that demonstrates outcomes associated with UR, more work is needed to establish a causal relationship between UR and these outcomes, to diversify the topics and scope of scholarship on UR, and to demonstrate the far-ranging impacts of UR.