Should Undergraduate Research Be Required?

At my undergraduate school, if you required all biology majors to do undergraduate research, you'd have to do some combination of the following things:

Triple the number of biology professors
Cut the number of biology majors by 66%
Provide an extremely minimal research experience for all involved

The honors students had to do research and write it up in a mini-thesis but losers like me didn't have to. And, infact, it was a bit of struggle to get a chance to do it at all if you weren't honors.

I don't even want to imagine what it would entail where I went to grad school where there were like 1000 biology majors every year :p

Maybe it could work in discipline-specific instances. Or perhaps the inclusion of a mandatory semester-long research course that was more involved than just taking a lab class. They had one of those at my grad school but it took lot of time for the professor and 2 TAs and a support staff member to pull it off, for less than 10 students. So again, scaling that up for all students seems problematic.

I chose the last option "ill-formed question", because I think research should be required as part of _any_ undergraduate major; the scientific method needs to be practised seriously at least once in college by everyone attending, including the arts majors.

I said ill formed. What IS research in this context? The question was raised in the quote but not answered. I don't quite get it. In 1/5 of a students time for a semester or even an academic year, what would they be doing? How much supervision would they be given such that they could even understand what it is like professionally? Or would this be like an intern thing where they end up doing scut work in a group, but some do learn the dynamics of how things get done. I don't quite get what the thing being advocated for or against really would be.

Off hand I would guess that beyond simple things the real teaching/research effort would be so much on faculty that in this day of 5% furlough everywhere, it would be overwhelming. But again, what is it that the students would be doing?

Its hard to tailor research projects to the needs of those undergrad students that are less-than-average, and not so motivated, and I would hate to see dumbed-down Mickeymouse kind of projects done only for the purpose doing some kind of mandatory research project. Especially if the undergrads are not really interested in the field - like the A+ grade-whores majoring in organic chemistry only because it helps them to improve chances of getting into a medical school. Maybe a fairly lose apprenticeship in a graduate research lab would be a better alternative, with a credit given for time served but without requirement for a formal minithesis paper coming out of it. If the undergrad student is good he can do lot more than hang around (and thus get get extra credits and recommendation for his research work). I would encourage it but I would not force it neither on the students nor the professors.

Formal, mentored research in a group producing publishable work is simply not scalable. The number of physics majors might just be small enough to provide that experience right now, but with the professional societies talking about doubling the number of physics majors, it won't be possible in the future. Moreover, with all the talk of accomplishing some of that doubling by preparing students for careers in industry or high school teaching, it's not clear to me that participation in a traditional physics research group even makes sense.

OTOH, if we define research a bit more broadly, to encompass any exploration of the unknown, any experiment or simulation where we don't know the answer, then those sorts of experiences can and should be included in advanced labs, computational classes, etc. There are lots of ways this could be done: You could give students some sample that hasn't been well-characterized and ask them to measure some optical or electrical property. You could ask students in an astrophysics class to download part of some data set from a telescope or satellite and look for certain things. In computational physics, you could ask them to run a solver on some nonlinear equation and see what happens when you change a parameter. And so forth. Most of these experiences would probably not generate any publication-quality results (although, who knows?) but they would all be very different in character from canned cookbook problems and experiments.

I know an organic chemist who optimizes a different synthesis every year in his class. They have 20 groups or whatever, each tries a different condition or parameter, throughout the quarter as they learn different techniques and different steps of the synthesis they apply those concepts to whatever condition they're studying, and by the end of the quarter or semester they've tried a synthesis under 20 different conditions and identified an optimal approach. It's nothing profound, they aren't synthesizing a new medication or biofuel, but it's a genuine unknown problem that's addressable in the context of their class.

Have I done any of this yet? Sadly, no. It takes a lot of prep. I don't think every course can/should be that way, but every department can try to have 1 class like that.

Several undergraduates have done their junior/senior honors thesis research in my lab, and its generally been very rewarding (and they made solid progress on their subprojects, which subsequently went into grant applications).

However, I agree with milkshake; if research were required for all students, someone would have to mentor the unmotivated ones, and that would be a drag for all concerned.

I am undecided because I have yet to see any study that substantively shows UG research to be beneficial. My personal experience was mixed. Most of my research assignments were make work. And the parts that were not were largely compromised by my lack of education at that stage. I continually hear claims of the benefits of UG research but I have yet to see a hand with a bird in it.

Further, my experience outside academia indicates that UG who had research experience are not as productive for a considerable period of time as are those who did not.

...pseudo-(social)-science

Isn't that redundant?

I am a mathematician. Most students simply do not learn enough in college to do a meaningful research project. Many can, however, learn to tackle a problem on their own. For others, a nom-research thesis might be more appropriate, even if they end up doing research later. Mandating research seems to me too extreme and "one-size-fits-all".

I agree with JohnV. In Physics and Chemistry depts, where the faculty student ratio is reasonable, then it can work. In Biology, it would be a disaster. In theory it may be a good idea, but its often tough to find faculty advisers/mentors in a dept with 25 faculty and 500 majors (and thats assuming all faculty are willing/capable of doing this).

Education is fees paid for Official certification. DCF/ROI parametizations demand minimum content sold at maximum price. Selection by demonstrated objective ability is discriminatory by law. From community colleges to Harvard, professional management rules the land.

Requiring undergraduates to acquire competence at cost to the university is insane. Any graduate with such contaminating his vita will be rejected out of hand by Human Resources in favor of diversity. The enlightened path is Canadian: Require science undergraduates to serve a fifth year in private industry while paying credit-hour and user fees.

One wonders why any degee is allowed to be conferred absent proper fraternity or sorority accredation.

One of the poll options was "No, some people are not cut out to do research." I voted Yes for exactly this reason. Many science majors go on to graduate school, in part because their professors tend to encourage it. The ones who aren't cut out for research should not go to grad school, and it is better for students in this category to find out before they commit themselves to 2+ years of misery whether in a masters program to begin with or ending up with a terminal masters after trying and failing to earn a Ph.D. I've encountered many students who are brilliant in the classroom but incompetent in the lab. At least they can honestly say that they tried it.

Whether the department has the resources to pull this off is another question entirely, as others have pointed out.

(Disclosure: I got my bachelors degree in a department which required an undergraduate thesis of all majors.)

I'm of the opinion that most undergraduates are incapable of research. They simply don't know enough to contribute meaningfully.

Even so, the vast majority of students are not going to college to become researchers. Requiring them to engage in research is a waste of everyone's time, as well as a waste of resources.

Giving opportunities to our brightest and most motivated undergraduates (less than 5%) is sufficient.

I will add my anecdotal experience to Eric Lund's post. In my subdivision of the biology department in grad school, none of the students who washed out without any degree had done undergrad research. In other words, everyone who decided "research isn't for me" hadn't done any prior to starting grad school. It was less drastic, but the people who came in as PhD students and who left with a master's were more likely to have not done any undergrad research either.

So if that holds true in other people's experience as well, it might suggest that there's value to mandatory research for an undergraduate degree. I still don't see how the logistics would work unless you have a really small student to faculty ratio.

I don't think it's practical, for time- and money-related reasons. Also, not all science majors have any intention to go into research; better to spend those resources on the ones who do.

And it also seems to me that it would add unnecessary aggro for the instructors. I've heard the complaints that the students don't know how to write a term/research paper (what do they teach in English these days?), and that's essentially just going through some of the published literature on a subject and making a report on the material; readability would be gravy. Now the instructor has to also teach a whole semester's-worth of students how to produce their own results and put them in a usable form, as well as write the report. I don't think it would be joyful.

No, for the love of all that's holy, NO!

I just graduated from undergrad and did undergraduate research for 2 years there. It helped me immensely in getting the job I have now (PRA) but not everyone is cut out for it. I had the unfortunate experience of spending a summer working with another girl who only applied for the REU because she thought it would help her get into med school. In fact she HATED research and she made my summer miserable, even though I was in a lab I loved with a professor I loved. Forcing all students to do research with hurt the experience of the students who want to do research. At my school there was no problem finding someone to do research with if you sought it out.

I would say another large problem with research at my school was that honors students were required to do a research thesis but professors did not get credit for mentoring them, thus it was sometimes difficult to get a professor to be your mentor for the thesis. My professor would only agree to mentor students who had worked with her for at least a semester before their senior year because it was too difficult to teach them the techniques and produce meaningful results.

I just graduated from undergrad and did undergraduate research for 2 years there. It helped me immensely in getting the job I have now (PRA) but not everyone is cut out for it. I had the unfortunate experience of spending a summer working with another girl who only applied for the REU because she thought it would help her get into med school. In fact she HATED research and she made my summer miserable, even though I was in a lab I loved with a professor I loved. Forcing all students to do research with hurt the experience of the students who want to do research. At my school there was no problem finding someone to do research with if you sought it out.

I would say another large problem with research at my school was that honors students were required to do a research thesis but professors did not get credit for mentoring them, thus it was sometimes difficult to get a professor to be your mentor for the thesis. My professor would only agree to mentor students who had worked with her for at least a semester before their senior year because it was too difficult to teach them the techniques and produce meaningful results.

I just graduated from undergrad and did undergraduate research for 2 years there. It helped me immensely in getting the job I have now (PRA) but not everyone is cut out for it. I had the unfortunate experience of spending a summer working with another girl who only applied for the REU because she thought it would help her get into med school. In fact she HATED research and she made my summer miserable, even though I was in a lab I loved with a professor I loved. Forcing all students to do research with hurt the experience of the students who want to do research. At my school there was no problem finding someone to do research with if you sought it out.

I would say another large problem with research at my school was that honors students were required to do a research thesis but professors did not get credit for mentoring them, thus it was sometimes difficult to get a professor to be your mentor for the thesis. My professor would only agree to mentor students who had worked with her for at least a semester before their senior year because it was too difficult to teach them the techniques and produce meaningful results.

I am an undergraduate working on an undergraduate research project right now! I have a faculty mentor but I thought up the project, wrote the proposal and am carrying out the research mostly on my own. It is a great learning experience, but really not something I can see the majority of the students in my major (biology) doing. If it were required, the pre-meds would complain about it to no end.
In addition, as a student who really enjoys working in a lab and doing my own research, it would be a huge drag for me to have a ton of other undergrads working in the lab who really didn't want to be there and who whined about it all the time.
It's great to have an undergraduate research program available for interested and motivated students (preferably one that provides them with funds) , but forcing all the science majors to do it is bad news for everyone.

When I was an undergrad all seniors in all majors were required to do some kind of "integrated excerise" aka comps. It occupies about 1/3 of your class load for one term senior year, although really in many departments the work is spread across the whole year. In most deparments it involves some kind of serious research (some kind of paper and/or presentation) that you have to present in the style of your discipline and demonstrate that you can put the pieces of what they are giving a you a degree in together. Sometimes there is a test option or a test in addition to. According to tales from recent alums this is still true.

I think it was the most useful part of my undergraduate education. The kind of critical thinking, research, and writing skills that I gained from that was invaluable. It was helpful not just in grad school but in my pre-grad school jobs as well.

In most departments all faculty were somehow involved in the comps fun, generally advising and grading. The grading was pass/fail, although you got to resubmit with revisions if it wasn't right the first time around. There was no D- standard for passing. A not insignificant number of people usually had to redo something.

I'm sure this is much easier to pull off in a small liberal arts college where a big department might have 25 seniors, however, I do think it was a really valuable experience

I got a BA in Psychology at a liberal arts college and we were required to do a research project and thesis our senior year. It was a great experience, and even though I'm not by an means a scientist I think it was a worthwhile pursuit that taught me a lot.

In college, I majored in both Political Science and Physics. Political Science is my passion, Physics was for fun. I did research in Political Science, but not in Physics. A requirement to do research in Physics would have prevented me from pursuing the major, meaning that there would have been one less person in the world who understands physics.

I agree that more students should be doing research, but in my experience, it's not for everyone (and not just because some people can't handle it).

It seems to me that anyone with an undergraduate degree in a basic science like physics, astronomy, chemistry, or biology should have a "meaningful research experience" that engages them in the core endeavor of the discipline, whether or not that individual plans to "go into research".

Not having an undergraduate research experience for a basic science major, in my view, seems akin getting a degree in cooking without actually ever producing something that people eat, or getting a degree in dental hygiene without ever having cleaned someone's teeth, to cite the first two flippant examples that come to mind.

Of course, it should go without saying that there are a variety of ways to get a "meaningful research experience", and not all of them cost a fortune in time and money. The organic chemistry lab example given above by Alex seems an excellent option that makes meaningful research scalable, for example.

As someone who has worked with dozens of first-year college students and other undergraduates on research problems such as the shape of stretched Spandex, the rental car problem (where to get gas to minimize fuel costs), the packing fractions of geometric solids, the landing of unfair dice, the tracking of the current semester's sunspots, the novice's understanding of density, the resistance of a sheet of aluminum foil, and the drain time for water leaking from a cone, I would say there are plenty of interesting, approachable, and occasionally even publishable research problems out there for undergraduates.

To those who tend to insist that topics like those above (being so far from cutting-edge science) cannot constitute a meaningful research experience, I might say, "Really?"

In college, I majored in both Political Science and Physics. Political Science is my passion, Physics was for fun. I did research in Political Science, but not in Physics.

At least you did research in one of your majors. I agree that it's not always practical for double majors to do research in both areas, especially for a combination like yours.

Nonetheless, there should be a capstone experience. Whether it is an undergraduate thesis (which I did), a comprehensive exam (similar to what Kate had), a thorough lab course among the requirements (as Gary advocates; my department also had such a requirement, in which we repeated some fundamental experiments which were mostly from the early 20th century), or some other solution will necessarily depend on the department, but there should be something.

Calculemus!
Brian Hayes
American Scientist
September-October 2008
Volume 96, Number 5
Pages: 362ff

"... Oddly enough, though, one thing we seldom do with the computer is compute. Only a minority of computer users ever sit down to write a program as a step in solving a problem or answering a question.... Inquisitive computing has a less prominent role today, if only because so many other applications of computers have upstaged it. These days, if I suggest that you answer a question by consulting a computer, you would think I meant to go ask Google. Nevertheless, programming for answers is still a living art...."

I hope you were kidding that social sciences are not a science

Physics Education Improves When Students Make Their Own Computer Models

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630163328.htm

... The group of students that made computer models performed better on more complex test questions. Their reasoning processes also confirmed the trend that modelling mainly benefits the learning of complex forms of knowledge. The students in the groups receiving direct and simulation-based instruction performed best on test questions requiring the reproduction of simple conceptual knowledge....

I hope you were kidding that social sciences are not a science

I wasn't calling social sciences pseudo-science, I was saying that this poll is pseudo-social-science, in that it's not remotely representative, etc.

I answered "Yes, for a different reason." All undergraduates in science should have a research or research-like experience before graduating. Why?

Reason #1: When a student investigates a mystery of some sort, he or she constructs knowledge. Recent research in learning shows that knowledge gained in such a way is _lasting_ knowledge whereas the knowledge gained through book learning is fleeting.

Reason #2: A research experience helps a student visualize himself or herself as a scientists (or have that science-isn't-for-me self-discovery experience); when a student can see himself or herself as a scientists, he or she is more likely to pursue this career path. We need more scientifically trained citizens in the world.

Reason #3: We teachers in higher education need to re-imagine the teaching paradigm. Currently, our science & mathematics courses are content driven ("I gotta get through the text/syllabus!") Now that so much content is easily accessible via the internet, and since we know that drill-and-kill drives people away from the sciences, we need to let concepts and tactile experiences drive science & mathematics education. Research and research-like experiences can and should drive this revision of higher education.

Reason #4: Undergraduate research experiences often open the door to the study of a discipline to those students who are traditionally excluded or driven away from science and mathematics. In a class, student success rides on memorization skills, cookbook labs and homework assignments, and class participation. Such an in-class experience cannot convey the excitement and rewards of pursuing science & mathematics. But a good research experience that allows a student to roll up his or her sleeves and immerse themselves in a topic can really excite a person and motivate them to take that next course in the science or mathematics major. For this reason, undergraduate research experience help draw more people into the study or science & mathematics so long as their research experience is EARLY in their college career.

ASIDE: On the assertion that some students are not capable of doing undergraduate research, I need to disagree. (Let's first agree that 'undergraduate research' means different things to different people.) All students in all disciplines are capable of carrying out high-quality, faculty mentored undergraduate research projects. At Truman State University, the Mathematics department (which graduates about 30-40 majors a year) has a Capstone graduation requirement for all majors that has all students conduct a research-like experience and write and present a paper. The quality of these projects varies, but all students are transformed to some extent by the experiences. Also at Truman, we have an NSF STEP grant to use undergraduate research as a vehicle for attracting more students to science and mathematics degree programs; we populate our summer program with students in their first or second year of school and students from regional community colleges. The work they do is phenomenal (and no, we don't select students on the basis of their academic record).

I answered "Yes, for a different reason." All undergraduates in science should have a research or research-like experience before graduating. Why?

Reason #1: When a student investigates a mystery of some sort, he or she constructs knowledge. Recent research in learning shows that knowledge gained in such a way is _lasting_ knowledge whereas the knowledge gained through book learning is fleeting.

Reason #2: A research experience helps a student visualize himself or herself as a scientists (or have that science-isn't-for-me self-discovery experience); when a student can see himself or herself as a scientists, he or she is more likely to pursue this career path. We need more scientifically trained citizens in the world.

Reason #3: We teachers in higher education need to re-imagine the teaching paradigm. Currently, our science & mathematics courses are content driven ("I gotta get through the text/syllabus!") Now that so much content is easily accessible via the internet, and since we know that drill-and-kill drives people away from the sciences, we need to let concepts and tactile experiences drive science & mathematics education. Research and research-like experiences can and should drive this revision of higher education.

Reason #4: Undergraduate research experiences often open the door to the study of a discipline to those students who are traditionally excluded or driven away from science and mathematics. In a class, student success rides on memorization skills, cookbook labs and homework assignments, and class participation. Such an in-class experience cannot convey the excitement and rewards of pursuing science & mathematics. But a good research experience that allows a student to roll up his or her sleeves and immerse themselves in a topic can really excite a person and motivate them to take that next course in the science or mathematics major. For this reason, undergraduate research experience help draw more people into the study or science & mathematics so long as their research experience is EARLY in their college career.

ASIDE: On the assertion that some students are not capable of doing undergraduate research, I need to disagree. (Let's first agree that 'undergraduate research' means different things to different people.) All students in all disciplines are capable of carrying out high-quality, faculty mentored undergraduate research projects. At Truman State University, the Mathematics department (which graduates about 30-40 majors a year) has a Capstone graduation requirement for all majors that has all students conduct a research-like experience and write and present a paper. The quality of these projects varies, but all students are transformed to some extent by the experiences. Also at Truman, we have an NSF STEP grant to use undergraduate research as a vehicle for attracting more students to science and mathematics degree programs; we populate our summer program with students in their first or second year of school and students from regional community colleges. The work they do is phenomenal (and no, we don't select students on the basis of their academic record).