The Purpose of Research: What Undergraduate Students Say

Culturally sustaining pedagogy may be used as an innovative theoretical framework to design an undergraduate research course to engage undergraduate students of color at predominantly white institutions. This article presents the theoretical basis for an undergraduate research course, examples of students’ experiences, and the instructors’ assessments of the course’s impact on student retention and persistence. The course presented may be used as a model for other educators to create additional courses that engage and support diverse undergraduate students in research through culturally sustaining pedagogical practices.

Reproducibility crises have arisen in psychology and other behavioral sciences, spurring efforts to ensure research findings are credible and replicable. Although reforms are occurring at professional levels in terms of new publication parameters and open science initiatives, the credibility and reproducibility of undergraduate research deserves attention. Undergraduate behavioral science research projects that rely on small convenience samples of participants, overuse hypothesis testing for drawing meaning from data, and engage in opaque statistical computing are vulnerable to producing nonreproducible findings. These vulnerabilities are reviewed, and practical recommendations for improving the credibility and reproducibility of undergraduate behavioral science research are offered.

Undergraduate research in Japan, called graduation research (GR), is comparable to that in other countries and is defined here as a final-year curricular activity that completes undergraduate study. This article aims to elucidate GR to contribute to the scholarship of undergraduate research from an international perspective. The main findings based on two nationwide surveys are (a) the percentage of degree programs with a compulsory course of GR is 87.8 percent in the humanities and 50.6 percent in the social sciences; (b) GR is more prevalent in national and public universities than private universities; and (c) undergraduates devote to GR an annual average of 430 hours in the humanities and 312 hours in the social sciences. These findings are interpreted in relation to national statistics of Japanese higher education.

The programs Minority Access in Research Careers (MARC) and Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) are funded by the National Institutes of Health to increase the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds earning degrees in the biomedical sciences. This article estimates the impact of participation in MARC and RISE on grade point averages, degree completion, and entrance into biomedical PhD programs. Supported students graduated at higher rates, had higher grade-point averages at graduation, and entered biomedical doctoral programs at much higher rates than students in a propensity score–matched comparison group. Results are comparable with previous study results of similar programs at other institutions and provide further evidence of the valuable support these programs provide to students from underrepresented backgrounds in achieving success in the biomedical sciences.

Teacher candidates have lower participation in undergraduate research than students in other disciplines. To enable teacher candidates to develop skills for scholarly activities and to engage them in research activities, teacher education programs utilize diverse approaches. This article describes a strategy to promote undergraduate research among teacher candidates using a systematic course-based infusion of skills necessary for undergraduate scholarship. In addition, it reports on the undergraduate students’ performance in research skills such as critical thinking, information literacy, and written communication in scholarly products over a three-year period. The results show an uneven but steady growth in research skills. Also discussed are the course and curricular modifications used by instructors to promote skill development for undergraduate research related to teaching