Mentored conference experiences support students' career exploration and professional development

This study looks at the experiences of seven graduate/postdoctoral research mentors in a novel aerospace engineering course that introduced undergraduate students to research at a midAtlantic research University. In this course, groups of (typically) three undergraduate students were mentored by one graduate student. The undergraduate students worked with and were led by these research mentors in various aerospace engineering research projects. In many cases, the undergraduate students were working on a project related to the research mentors’ theses or research work. Previous studies looking at the undergraduate research experience do so from the undergraduate students’ perspectives; this paper focuses on this experience from the research mentors’ perspectives. In this paper, the experiences of seven research mentors who were involved with the course in the fall 2011 and spring 2012 semesters are described. The paper answers the following research questions: (1) What benefits result from being a research mentor? and (2) In what ways does being a research mentor prepare graduate students for their future careers? Data were collected via individual interviews with the research mentors at the end of each semester. Using situated learning as the theoretical framework, the data were analyzed to determine themes that characterized the research mentor experience. The theory of situated learning was used to identify and inform the ways in which being research mentors can prepare the mentors for their future careers, specifically in terms of how they are prepared to become members of the communities of practice they aspire to join. The benefits for research mentors were classified as follows: (1) benefits related to preparation for their future careers, such as strengthening their technical skills and content knowledge, and developing and improving various professional skills, and (2) benefits related to their current positions as students/postdoctoral scholars, such as receiving help with their theses or research projects. This study is part of a longer-term study to determine the effectiveness of this aerospace engineering course, both in terms of the undergraduate students’ learning experiences, and in terms of the graduate students’ professional development. The results shared in this paper can be useful to universities, departments, and faculty members who: (1) are interested in graduate student professional development, and (2) would like to learn about a novel way to involve graduate students in undergraduate courses.

The Importance of Scientific Publishing: Teaching an Undergraduate How to Swim the Entire Length of the Pool

Examining differences and similarities between graduate and undergraduate students' user satisfaction with digital libraries

There are many benefits for undergraduate students who attend professional conferences, such as having increased confidence for conducting research, gaining a better understanding of a field, developing a professional identity, and improving abilities to network. Professional organizations also benefit from undergraduate student attendance by improving field recognition and promoting the growth of the field through the development of future professionals. It is important to mentor students for professional conference attendance to decrease anxiety and provide a context in which they can benefit from conference attendance. The project described includes a systematic reflection from six undergraduate students from SUNY Old Westbury and their faculty mentor about the group’s attendance at the 2017 SCRA Biennial Conference. Logistics of getting to the conference and other preparation for the conference are also discussed. Recommendations are provided for faculty mentors to effectively mentor students before, during, and after conference attendance. Recommendations to conference organizers are provided to improve integration of undergraduate students in professional conferences.

Research experiences for undergraduates have increased in availability at universities and government laboratories throughout the nation. Government agencies, universities and private donors support these activities with a variety of expectations, including providing a more skilled workforce, creating a greater emphasis on graduate education and increased retention of students in highly technical fields. While the value of these programs has been well-established, there is a paucity of empirically-based research on the various models and practices of these experiences that have the greatest impact on the students. The focus of this study was a National Science Foundation funded Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) program at a 4-year college in the Midwest funded for over 7 years. In a previous study we found that REU students interacted more frequently with graduate students than their faculty advisor while in the program. In this study we examined more closely the role of the graduate student mentors and how it directly influenced the REU student experience. Two data sources analyzed in this study were preand post-program surveys and semi-structured interviews, both administered to the REU students. Three main themes emerged from the data, including: 1) Academics and Careers, 2) Teaching and Learning, and 3) Building Relationships. When examining the nature of these interactions, 75% of REU students reported having influential experience with their graduate student mentors related to Academic Programs and Careers and 100% reported influential experiences related to Teaching and Learning and Building Relationships. In exploring Academic Programs and Careers further, many of the experiences were related directly to the undergraduates’ academic and career paths and exposure to graduate school and laboratory careers. In Teaching and Learning, REU students described various methods and strategies (i.e., demonstration, questioning, and discussion) the graduate students used to teach them about their research project. In regards to Building Relationships, the graduate students were described as mentors, collaborators, and supervisors. In summary, this research provides insight into role of the graduate student mentors in an REU program and how they directly influence undergraduate students experiences with engineering research, graduate school and careers while in the program.

RIO GRANDE VALLEY, the Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship, School of Accountancy invites applications from

Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) enhance student retention, provide transferrable skills, and prepare students for advanced graduate study. The majority of these benefits, however, are concentrated within the natural and biological sciences; disciplines with historical under-representation of non-male students. If offered in the social sciences, UREs would be more accessible to women, students of colour, and first-generation students. But there are relatively few models and little research to confirm that UREs in the social sciences offer similar benefits to students. Using mixed methods data, we compare students’ (n = 122) and research supervisors’ (n = 56) perceptions of success in meeting learning outcomes for students participating in social science UREs. The combination of quantitative and qualitative survey data shows that students gain skills in research (e.g. data collection, management, and analysis) as well as other transferrable skills helpful in various career paths (e.g. collaboration, time management, problem-solving). We also demonstrate that faculty supervisors perceive significant benefits from overseeing UREs, such as enhancing professional development and increased job satisfaction. These findings demonstrate the need for expanding UREs beyond the biological/natural sciences where they have been focused to date.

Career exploration is an important factor in shaping young adults’ future career goals. However, many young people struggle with limited self-understanding and a lack of awareness of available career options, which directly hinders their ability to engage effectively in career exploration. Despite the importance of career exploration, empirical evidence examining how perceived future employability and career aspiration jointly influence career exploration among young adults remains limited, making it difficult to design effective interventions to support students’ career development. This study aims to examine the relationship between perceived future employability, career aspiration and career exploration among young adults. A quantitative approach was employed using scales as data collection tools. This study involved 219 students (32.87% male, 67.12 % female) aged 18-20 years (M_age= 19.06, SD= 1.59) as participants. Three scales were used, namely the career exploration scale, career aspiration scale, and perceived future employability scale, and the data were analyzed using linear regression with SPSS version 22.0 for windows. The results showed that perceived future employability and career aspiration were significantly related to career exploration. Together, perceived future employability and career aspiration contributed 26.4% to career exploration. Separately, perceived future employability showed a positive relationship with career exploration, whereas career aspiration did not show a significant relationship. These findings have implications on how parents, educational institutions, and career counselors may assist students in enhancing career exploration through improving perceived of future employability.

“Good luck on your first day as an assistant professor, Dr. Tanner! Have a great class!” On the wall above my desk, these words scream out from an otherwise encouraging note that is adorned with many exclamation points. This note has hung on my wall since my very first day as an Assistant Professor of Biology. As I was charging off to teach my first class, a senior faculty member who had been on my hiring committee slipped this note under my office door. In moments of pause years later, I still stare up at that note and breathe a sigh of relief that I had much more than luck to guide me on my first day as a college-level teacher. Although I continue to have much to learn—as all of us do no matter the number of years of teaching experience—I did arrive at the university with both formal and informal training in science education. I had had plenty of exposure to innovative pedagogical approaches, questioning strategies, and techniques for engaging diverse audiences in learning science. As a scientist educator, I had had the privilege of many years of collaboration with outstanding K–12 educators as well as a postdoctoral fellowship in science education. However, my training has been, to say the least, unconventional compared with that of my fellow junior faculty and unique in its preparation in regard to the teaching and learning of my discipline. It will not be news to anyone reading this article that university and college teaching is to a large extent a profession with no formal training. It’s startling but true that the majority of faculty members—and lecturers who often teach large numbers of students—have no formal training in the teaching and learning of their discipline. In fact, the hiring process in university science departments is structured primarily to evaluate a faculty candidate’s ability to be a productive researcher, with success measured in number of publications and magnitude of grant funds raised. Depending on the type of institution, for example, research university, state-level university, or liberal arts college, there may be a component of the faculty interview process that probes a candidate’s teaching ability, for example, requesting a statement of teaching philosophy and requiring the candidate to teach a sample lecture class. However, this sample lecture often screens for gross inadequacies, rather than looking for stellar innovations or pedagogical skills. This lack of formal, accredited training for university and college instructors stands in stark contrast to the requirements for a high school teacher who is charged with the education of students only a year junior to college freshmen. High school teachers in the United States must be credentialed as a secondary science teacher, demonstrate subject matter competency in every subject that they will be teaching, and must continually engage in professional development in the teaching and learning of their discipline throughout their career as a science teacher. With the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind legislation, the onus is upon each precollege science teacher to become “highly qualified” in terms of formal university-level training in science education. However, no such required professional training or measurable standards for teaching are required in institutions of higher education. Many policy documents have suggested standards of teaching practice in postsecondary science education (National Research Council, 1996, 1997; Siebert and McIntosh, 2001), but the extent of implementation of these ideals is unclear and has gone relatively unstudied, although national and regional accreditation boards do look at outcomes, asking colleges and universities to assess what their students have gained from four years of study at their institutions. Nonetheless, there is a striking reversal of accountability that happens when one crosses the precollege teaching to college-level teaching boundary (Table 1). During the K–12 school years, society expects K–12 teachers to be responsible for student learning. Salaries of teachers in many states are tied to student test scores, and poor student performance can potentially invoke penalties. At a college or university, several variables in the educational universe shift. Students are the ones responsible for learning. The evaluation and compensation of college-level teachers is not DOI: 10.1187/cbe.05–12–0132 Address correspondence to: Kimberly Tanner (kdtanner@sfsu.edu). CBE—Life Sciences Education Vol. 5, 1–6, Spring 2006

Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs have been credited for attracting and retaining students in science and engineering who otherwise may not have considered disciplines in science and engineering as their career choices.In addition to core research activities, REU programs generally provide multiple enrichment and professional development activities for participants.While the nature and the number of professional development activities vary from one REU program to another, the most common activities include ethics and safety training, research and industry seminars, GRE workshops, writing workshops, graduate school application preparation, and industry visits.Furthermore, some of these professional development activities are also conducted in large group settings with students from other research programs beyond the REU cohort.The rationale behind combining REU students with other researchers is to create a community of learners and provide them with an opportunity to build/extend their professional network.Although professional development activities are an integral part of the REU sites, there is often very limited coverage of such activities in the existing literature on REU projects.This paper presents the impact of professional development activities on the experience of REU participants in a manufacturing REU site at a major research university in the southwestern United States.For this study, data was collected from participants by an external evaluator by using both qualitative and quantitative methods.This paper presents and describes the cumulative data from three REU cohorts.The analysis and results of the data are disaggregated by the student academic level (sophomore, junior, senior), gender, ethnicity, the type of their home institutions (research or teaching institution), and desired career paths in the future (graduate school or industry).The paper also provides a detailed discussion and implications of these findings.

The drive to broaden equitable access to undergraduate research experiences has catalyzed the development and implementation of course‐based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). Biology education has prioritized embedding CUREs in introductory labs, which are frequently taught by graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Thus, a CURE GTA is expected not only to teach but also to support novice student researchers. We know little about how GTAs perform as research mentors in a CURE, or how the quality of their mentorship and support impacts undergraduate students. To address this gap in knowledge, we conducted a phenomenological study of an introductory biology CURE, interviewing 25 undergraduate students taught by nine different GTAs at a single institution. We used self‐determination theory to guide our exploration of how students' autonomous motivation to engage in a CURE is impacted by perceptions of GTA support. We found that highly motivated students were more likely to experience factors hypothesized to optimize motivation in the CURE, and to perceive that their GTA was highly supportive of these elements. Students with lower motivation were less likely to report engaging in fundamental elements of research offered in a CURE. Our findings suggest that GTAs directly impact students' motivation, which can, in turn, influence whether students perceive receiving the full research experience as intended in a CURE. We contend that practitioners who coordinate CUREs led by GTAs should therefore offer curated training that emphasizes supporting students' autonomous motivation in the course and engagement in the research. Our work suggests that GTAs may differ in their capacity to provide students with the support they need to receive and benefit from certain pedagogical practices. Future work assessing innovative approaches in undergraduate biology laboratory courses should continue to investigate potenital differential outcomes for students taught by GTAs.

This article reports on findings from a research project designed to assess undergraduate and graduate students’ language-learning needs in the context of a new academic language support center at a Canadian university. A total of 432 students of English as an additional language and 93 instructors responded to the questionnaires, which asked them to provide importance ratings of academic language skills, to assess their own or their students’ skill status, and to respond to open-ended questions. This article reports on data collected from the writing section of the study.The findings indicated that there is much overlap in the skill items identified as ‘very important’ between graduate and undergraduate students and instructors. Students’ self-assessments and instructors’ assessments of their students differed dramatically, however. In addition to important pedagogical implications, this study suggests a need to be cautious when interpreting needs assessment results because what instructors or students consider as an important skill to possess may not be what students need to develop.

Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) aim to improve students' research skills, disciplinary knowledge, and career confidence. However, faculty mentors often lack formal training in effective mentoring practices. This study investigates the impact of professional development (PD) on faculty mentors in a physics REU program, focusing on communication and setting expectations, using a modified “Entering Mentoring” PD curriculum. A mixed-methods design explored three research questions: (1) What expectations do mentors establish, and how might they differ? (2) What realities do mentors experience, and how do expectations evolve? (3) What effect did PD have on mentoring, and how do interview and survey data converge to explain REU participant growth? Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with eight faculty mentors, post-program CIMER mentor surveys, and student surveys measuring their confidence in research abilities. Qualitative data were analyzed using constant comparative methods, while quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and t-tests to assess growth among two REU cohorts: one with mentor PD and one without. Results revealed that mentors faced challenges such as affording independence to mentees and selecting achievable research projects, regardless of experience. Despite these challenges, mentors focused on the research process, rather than the product, providing students with an authentic research experience. This approach led to significant perceived growth in students' general research skills, as reported by both mentors and mentees. Synthesis of qualitative and quantitative data showed that the PD program positively influenced mentoring practices and student outcomes. The 2024 PD-trained cohort showed statistically significant growth in research independence (Q24: d=0.86) and career confidence (Q49: d=0.62) compared to the non-PD 2023 cohort. This study emphasizes the importance of PD in improving mentoring practices and enhancing student growth, offering valuable insights for future REU programs.

Employers are highlighting the importance of knowledge and professional skills, including personal, interpersonal, communication, and thinking, in their quest for graduates who are prepared for the workforce. Collaborative research is an essential toolbox that integrates knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which is important for future engineers; nonetheless, undergraduate students often struggle to engage effectively in this key competency. This study presents an undergraduate sustainability research experience (CUSRE) that is built into two courses, utilizing a collaborative-based learning (CBL) setting aimed at creating knowledge, improving skills and competencies, encouraging inclusivity, and advancing equitable education. The objective of the study is to narrow the achievement gap, improve graduation rates, and boost students’ enthusiasm and readiness for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It encompasses a strategy that integrates key approaches, including collaborative research, sustainability as a core value and practice, and educational equity supported by compensatory pedagogy that emphasizes teamwork. Introduced at the University of Ottawa (uOttawa) in Canada, the initiative engaged students to deepen their understanding of the SDGs through research cases and projects. This experience yielded significant knowledge gains and a considerable success rate among participants. Moreover, it has been successfully scaled and adapted for the Global Banking School (GBS) in the UK, thereby broadening its impact to a larger audience.

Introduction: In academic written texts, linguistic and rhetorical features are often interactively used as a vehicle for writers to construct their texts in order to accomplish specific communicative purposes. However, the effective integration of these resources may pose challenges for developing writers. Purpose: This study employed a corpus-based genre analysis approach to investigate phrasal complexity features and rhetorical functions in data commentaries written by Iranian undergraduate and graduate students. Through this approach, we aimed to examine a relatively unexplored genre of data commentary in terms of its phrasal complexity features, rhetorical functions, and their relationships. By analyzing these relationships, we sought to provide insights into the writing practices of Iranian undergraduate and graduate students in the context of data commentaries. Method: This study employed a convenient sampling method to select a total of 76 university students, which included 47 undergraduate students and 29 graduate students. The participants were involved in generating a corpus of 380 data commentaries, which were then thoroughly examined and compared. To identify instances of phrasal complexity features, the researchers utilized the AntConc software tool, applying regular expressions (regex) to extract potential occurrences. Additionally, a Python program was developed and implemented to calculate the frequencies of the identified PCFs. The researchers manually annotated the rhetorical function of the data commentaries to determine their specific usage. Results: Statistical analysis such as Mann Whitney U test and Spearman correlation test, revealed that graduate students significantly utilized more phrasal complexity features including attributive adjectives, nominalizations, and prepositional phrases (of) compared to undergraduate students. However, a qualitative analysis showed that the use of these linguistic features is influenced by the writing topics. Regarding rhetorical functions, graduate students used more moves and/or steps related to presenting and commenting data, while undergraduate students produced more moves or steps concerning personal asides. Moreover, certain phrasal complexity features and the moves and/or steps were found to be correlated, aligning with recent corpus-based studies. Conclusion: The study concludes with pedagogical implications.