Collaborative Research WIDER: Improving Undergraduate Education through Community Building

This project is testing, refining, and disseminating a promising evidence-based model for guiding effective undergraduate research. The model is based on five years of data. Additional testing and refinement activity are underway to ensure applicability across diverse institutional settings. The project will create and provide the resources needed to support successful implementation at any undergraduate institution. Through collaborations with the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and the Science Education Resource Center SERC) at Carleton College, the project intends to foster national communities of STEM scholars who are trained and motivated to sustain and expand this model. The model is designed to ensure that the student learning outcomes from participation in undergraduate research are as strong as possible. It deliberately generates formative guidance during the research through a series of quantitative, built-in formative evaluations conducted over the duration of each research experience. Evaluation is a central component of this model. The model emphasizes multiple progress assessments by both faculty and students across a wide range of desirable outcomes, so that the evaluation process provides essential information used by both students and faculty to advance learning objectives. The design approach transcends specific STEM disciplines. This transcendent feature offers an opportunity to aggregate impact results across a series of undergraduate research experiences. The model's built-in evaluation feature will provide summary data on student learning that could be used to inform resource allocation decisions.