Effective Practices
Promote research for undergraduate students in your program or department
- Collaboratively determine the different goals and roles for research experiences in your department, e.g., research as a process of discovering new knowledge or as training that develops research skills.
- Discuss the value for students of research in different experimental, computational, and theoretical areas, including physics education and applied research.
- Develop explicit strategies for recruiting students from into undergraduate research and supporting them. Recognize that a approach is insufficient to ensure that these students can participate and have positive experiences in undergraduate research. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for details.
- Establish for the research skills your department believes students should acquire, and a that identifies the activities (courses and on- and off-campus opportunities) that support students in achieving these outcomes.
- Discuss for research skills with all research mentors (e.g., faculty, instructors, postdoctoral research associates, graduate students, and technicians), and establish common expectations of student performance and how students will be evaluated.
- Periodically review for research skills, the research experiences available to students (e.g., experiences within and outside the curriculum, on and off campus, and for students from their first years through senior years), and the that connects them. Make adjustments to improve alignment.
- Form a departmental undergraduate research committee to coordinate efforts to support students.
- Track student participation in and outcomes from undergraduate research (see Programmatic Assessments below for examples of data to collect), and use the results to identify successes that could be expanded and areas that need improvement.
- Recognize the diverse approaches to engaging students in research, e.g., differences in how advisors work with students, the kinds of problems and methods they choose, the number of student participants and how students work with each other, and different time scales for projects and publications. Discuss department expectations with all faculty, particularly new hires and pre-tenure faculty.
- Establish common faculty expectations around treatment of research students, e.g., that faculty will treat students with kindness, support students’ goals and interests, respect students’ other responsibilities, and have humane expectations of quantity and timing of work hours.
- Encourage interdisciplinary research projects and projects focused on community, business, and industry needs.
- Ask faculty candidates to write short descriptions and timetables of their research plan, including how they will involve undergraduate students in research and how they will supervise and mentor these students.
- Discuss with candidates and new hires how they will provide meaningful research experiences for undergraduate students while advancing their scholarly agendas.
- Hire diverse faculty who can provide research role models for diverse students. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for details.
- Guide candidates in requesting start-up funds and/or external grant supplements to support their research plans.
- Recognize and encourage faculty and faculty candidates who are enthusiastic about engaging undergraduates in research but who have not previously done so.
- Recognize undergraduate research mentoring in faculty evaluations, e.g., for retention, tenure, promotion, and merit.
- Clarify expectations for whether and how much faculty are expected to engage undergraduate students in research, and how it will be “counted” in performance reviews, e.g., as teaching or as part of research expectations.
- Integrate undergraduate research supervision into instructional workload calculations. For example, consider classifying individual research mentoring as a course, or adjust teaching assignments for faculty and others who supervise student research projects.
- Streamline faculty workload to allow time to effectively mentor undergraduate student researchers, e.g., minimize new preparations and schedule courses and meetings to provide faculty with a full day for research.
- Ensure that research mentors (e.g., faculty, instructors, postdocs, graduate students, and technicians) are given training on working effectively with students, including, e.g., effective mentoring, inclusive practices, cross-cultural mentoring, ethics, power dynamics, disability awareness, conflict resolution, discrimination, and harassment. Collaborate with appropriate offices within your institution (e.g., your human resources office; your teaching and learning center; or your office of equity, diversity, and inclusion) and/or see Resources below for external training opportunities.
- Ensure all research mentors are aware of and use best practices for working with students from , e.g., .
- Discuss effective mentoring strategies both within your department and with other departments at your institution.
- Develop guides outlining expectations for research mentors, regarding, e.g., frequency of meetings with students, availability of mentors, and how to create and maintain a supportive work environment.
- Build a budget to support research expenses (e.g., travel, equipment maintenance, and supplies) within your department, within a group of departments, or at another appropriate institutional level.
- Develop and support a culture of applying for grants with undergraduate research support included. Guide faculty on sources of internal funding (e.g., supplies and travel grants) and external funding, (e.g., , , , , , and the National Space Grant Consortium).
- Advocate for personnel and financial support from your institution for maintaining research equipment that undergraduates use, e.g., through maintenance contracts or hiring a staff member to maintain and build equipment and train students to do so.
- Periodically review how many students each faculty member funds to participate in undergraduate research, to ensure that all students have equitable access to research opportunities and that faculty and students are aware of available resources.
- Provide multiple pathways within and outside the curriculum for students to participate in research (e.g., course credit, work study, course-embedded experiences, bootcamps, summer research, internships, and promotion of opportunities) and guide students through the process of applying for and participating in these experiences.
- Develop and promote four-year degree plans that incorporate formal research experiences. Communicate that they are available and encouraged for all students as part of the major.
- Consider requiring all majors to participate in an undergraduate research experience, in order to ensure that all students take advantage of this learning opportunity. Take care to ensure that the requirements for research experiences are not too onerous for students with other commitments, e.g., work, family, and/or a second major.
- If you do not have the resources for every physics major to have an individual research experience, see Consider implementing course-based research experiences (CUREs) below.
- Encourage faculty to incorporate activities that address the for research skills when revising courses and curricula.
- Use your to ensure that student research activities are connected to one another throughout the curriculum, from foundational courses to capstone experiences.
- Provide opportunities for all students to participate in research, not just those who appear enthusiastic or high-achieving according to traditional criteria such as GPA and class performance.
- Recognize that, depending on their backgrounds and whether or not they have seen people like them doing research, students may not be equally aware of or feel equally welcome in research opportunities, and some may need individual encouragement to participate. Educate advisors, research mentors, , and students on the in order to mitigate its effects on whether a student pursues undergraduate research.
- Provide and promote paid research opportunities, recognizing that unpaid positions are often inaccessible to students who must work to pay for college.
- Systematically track which students are participating in undergraduate research, and look for and address sources of inequity.
- Create and/or connect with student support programs (e.g., early research programs, research cohort models, peer mentoring programs, identity-based student organizations, and STEM-wide programs for students from ) to nurture a community of scholars and reduce isolation.
- Provide students with a professional environment that is safe and harassment free. See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for details.
- Provide and organize adequate space for individual and group research projects, including off-hour access (if appropriate, and only with appropriate safety precautions).
- Provide mechanisms to recognize students for their accomplishments and efforts, e.g., congratulatory emails and letters, awards, and recognition ceremonies.
- Provide opportunities for students and alumni to give formal and informal feedback on their research experiences (e.g., surveys, end-of-semester social events, and exit interviews of graduating seniors) and use this feedback to improve undergraduate research in your program.
- Develop and maintain formal structures to report and address problems in research mentoring relationships and research groups, to surface the concerns of vulnerable students who might not come forward through informal mechanisms.
- Discuss the usefulness of undergraduate research experiences in all required courses. Inform students about for research skills and how the curriculum, on- and off-campus experiences, etc., can support these outcomes.
- Highlight the value of research activities in cultivating skills that prepare students for careers and graduate school, and the weight that admission committees place on such research experience when evaluating graduate school applications.
- Ensure that the recruiting and selection process for research students is fair and equitable, especially if your department does not require all majors to participate in research, e.g., by consciously addressing . See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for details.
- Consider having research mentors visit relevant first-year courses and talk about their work at an appropriate mathematical and scientific level.
- Use department seminars, information sessions, advising sessions, and your department’s public media (e.g, website, social media, newsletters, and marketing materials) to promote and publicize the benefits of undergraduate research, how to find and apply for research opportunities, and available research experiences for undergraduates.
- Create an online repository of links to internal and external undergraduate research opportunities and update this list regularly. See Resources below for external opportunities.
- Publicize research done by current and former students as well as its impact on their education, e.g., through seminars, poster sessions, information sessions, alumni panels, and highlighting of students’ publications and presentations on your department website, wall displays, and other promotional materials.
- Recruit students who have successfully found research experiences in previous years to mentor prospective researchers in finding and applying for external opportunities.
- Consider assigning exercises involving searching for research opportunities and practicing writing applications in any courses with career development components.
- Emphasize the value of undergraduate research and of research advisors' letters of recommendation for students’ careers, graduate school applications, and scholarships.
Design meaningful research experiences for undergraduate students
- Discuss students’ short- and long-term goals for projects, and use these goals to set clear expectations based on students’ available time and interests.
- Design projects with elements that students can finish in a fixed length of time, e.g., in a summer, quarter, semester, or academic year.
- Match the timeline of the project with defined deliverables and dissemination plans, e.g., if the experience extends over multiple semesters, incorporate end-of-semester papers and presentations; if the experience is a single semester, consider early progress reports that are iteratively revised.
- Start a student research project with straightforward elements; incorporate increasing complexity as the student experiences success.
- Emphasize student agency, giving students multiple opportunities to make critical decisions that guide the research.
- Provide students with some independence to explore a part of the research that interests them and arrive at their own conclusions.
- Build resilience by normalizing failure and setbacks as part of the scientific process and emphasizing the importance of learning from mistakes.
- Encourage students to ask questions and recognize that not all questions have immediate answers.
- Ensure that students know there may be many solutions to a problem and that research can be a nonlinear process.
- Provide scaffolding for students and other junior researchers to participate in discussions in research group meetings, e.g., by providing opportunities for them to present and get feedback on work in progress, paying attention to who is talking and how much during discussions, and setting aside time for them to ask questions or make comments.
- Encourage faculty to leverage their existing collaborations so that students can interact with multiple research mentors and expand their professional networks.
- Provide research mentee training for students, e.g., using the “Entering Mentoring” curriculum. See Resources below.
- Develop a guide that outlines professional expectations for students (e.g., with respect to behavior, performance, and maintaining an inclusive, harassment-free environment) for distribution to undergraduate students at the start of their research projects.
- Discuss technical aspects of research projects with students, recognizing that they may be unfamiliar with the disciplinary language.
- Promote training on relevant laboratory equipment and computational techniques.
- Establish and maintain a culture of safety consciousness with regular discussions of safety policies and procedures.
- Provide training to undergraduate students and their research mentors that addresses ethics topics including plagiarism, data management, data representation, confidentiality, and human subjects protections. See the section on Ethics for details.
- Collaborate with appropriate offices within your institution (e.g., human resources; equity, diversity, and inclusion) to train undergraduate students on institutional policies and responsibilities related to harassment, discrimination, and conflict resolution.
- Encourage and support peer-mentored research, e.g., by having more experienced research students mentor and train incoming research students, with faculty oversight and appropriate training. See Resources below.
- Provide opportunities for students to work on research in teams by discussing the value of teamwork in careers, training students to work in teams, and evaluating teamwork.
- Promote the use of peer evaluation of student research products (write-ups, posters, presentations, theses, manuscripts, etc.) to mimic proposal and manuscript review as well as provide .
- Create and sustain a community to nurture students as scholars and reduce isolation, e.g., through sharing meals, field trips, informal gatherings, and presentations with peer feedback.
- If there aren’t enough researchers in each research group to have a shared group space, create a cohort of research students by providing a shared departmental space and encouraging students to help each other acquire essential skills, collaborate on common problems, and ask each other research-related questions. See the section on The Physical Environment: Encourage Collaboration and Learning for guidance on how to provide and manage inclusive and welcoming spaces where students can gather and collaborate.
- If there are not enough students in your program to form a cohort, consider partnering with other departments in your institution or other institutions in your area.
- Provide opportunities for students to give informal and elevator-pitch presentations of their research at appropriate and varied venues, e.g., events for prospective students, alumni, and community members.
- Provide opportunities and funding for students to give formal presentations of their research on campus (e.g., at seminars and poster sessions) and off campus (e.g., at undergraduate and professional conferences).
- Provide opportunities and support for students to ask questions and engage in each other’s work during presentations, to build community and support students’ growth as scientists.
- Encourage faculty to support students in publishing their internal reports, procedures, theses, and/or manuscripts (e.g., in conference proceedings, undergraduate research journals, professional journals).
- Develop mini research projects that are feasible within the course timeframe and that teach the research skills established in 1.a.iv.
- Design clear expectations and timelines for activities within the course time structure, e.g., setting milestones of project development, operation, analysis, and final reporting.
- Allocate sufficient resources (faculty, space, budget, equipment) for student groups to bring flexibility in designs, working hours, and data acquisition while maintaining a safe laboratory environment. See the section on Instructional Laboratories and Experimental Skills for guidance on how to create and maintain laboratory spaces and equipment and a safe environment.
- Provide structures and mentoring on professional behavior for students to navigate interpersonal issues when working in collaborative groups.
Create an institutional infrastructure to support undergraduate research
- Advocate for inclusion of undergraduate research in your institution’s strategic plan and mission statement.
- Advocate for resources, including space, from administrators, legislators, donors, etc., by communicating the distinctive value of undergraduate research for students (see Evidence below) and its contribution to the region’s economic development, e.g., preparing students for the regional and national workforce, producing patents, and supporting the economy through research-related internships.
- Prioritize obtaining funding for paid research experiences to provide equitable access to these opportunities for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Advocate for institutional financial support for student researchers, e.g., stipends, free or low-cost summer housing for students doing summer research, supplies, and travel to present at conferences.
- Advocate for institutional financial support for faculty mentoring undergraduate student researchers, e.g., start-up funding, mentor stipends for summer research, grant-writing support, professional development related to mentoring, and increased travel support.
- Collaborate with your development or fundraising office to raise funds to support students and faculty participating in research, e.g., via one-time funding or endowed programs.
- Consider applying for an site or other similar research site program, possibly in collaboration with other departments or institutions, to fund and promote a summer undergraduate research program on your campus.
- Display student research products widely, e.g., on your institutional and departmental websites, in promotional materials, and in alumni newsletters.
- Collaborate with other departments and your administration to support campus-wide undergraduate research activities and initiatives, e.g., institution-wide research celebrations, summer research programs, and undergraduate travel/supplies grant programs.
- Publicize the outcomes of undergraduate research to institutional stakeholders such as trustees, alumni, donors, businesses, and the student government association.
- Use data on student participation and successes in undergraduate research for fundraising and in grant proposals. See Programmatic Assessments below.
- Foster disciplinary and interdisciplinary research connections among faculty across your institution, to strengthen undergraduate research at your institution.
- Recognize that undergraduate research may have many stakeholders (e.g., donors, those who want to use it for institution and faculty recognition) who can shape the student experience in positive as well as negative ways (e.g., by applying pressure to achieve particular outcomes).