Undergraduate engineering students' perceptions of research and researchers

Background: Participating in undergraduate research experiences (UREs) supports the development of engineering students' technical and professional skills. However, little is known about the perceptions of research or researchers that students develop through these experiences. Understanding these perceptions will provide insight into how students come to understand knowledge evaluation and creation, while allowing research advisors to better support student development. Purpose: In this paper, we explore how undergraduate engineering students perceive what it means to do research and be a researcher, using identity and epistemic cognition as sensitizing concepts. Our goal is to explore students' views of UREs to make the benefits of these experiences more accessible. Design/Method: We created and adapted open-ended survey items from previously published studies. We collected responses from mechanical and biomedical engineering undergraduates at five institutions (n = 154) and used an inductive approach to analyze responses. Results: We developed four salient themes from our analysis: (a) research results in discovery, (b) research includes dissemination such as authorship, (c) research findings are integrated into society, and (d) researchers demonstrate self-regulation. Conclusions: The four themes highlight factors that students perceive as part of a researcher identity and aspects of epistemic cognition in the context of UREs. These results suggest structuring UREs to provide opportunities for discovery, dissemination, societal impact, and self-regulation will help support students in their development as researchers.