CTE View column by Dan Bernstein: Undergraduate research experience complements general education
The undergraduate experience at KU is distinguished by a number of opportunities, including global participation, service connected with learning, and research participation. While not every faculty member is connected with the global and service programs, we are all involved in ongoing research and inquiry in our fields. Just as we grow intellectually from our continued participation in research, undergraduates’ experience with research generates in them both a richer understanding of the field they study and a more personal motivation for learning. An intensive exploration into the process of gaining knowledge in a concentrated area is an excellent complement to the benefits of a general and broad education provided in conventional classes.
It could be argued that successfully educated college graduates rely less on authority per se as a source for understanding. Educated people critically evaluate multiple sources of evidence and information, and they are also practiced at bringing various frames of reference to the analysis of what has been found. Lifelong learning will depend upon establishing patterns of intellectual inquiry that are well represented in the various forms of research that KU faculty do. While it is good that we share with students the products of our inquiry through lectures and writing, there is a complementary form of learning that comes only from engaging directly and personally in the search for understanding.
A wide range of activities are part of the research enterprise, ranging from mundane and rote tasks to complex forms of design and interpretation. Some research skills are practical and manual, while others involve only the manipulation of symbols, and yet another kind of skill largely involves creative and conceptual thinking. Students working on research can engage in all those activities, and the best undergraduate research participation program would include that full range. Students should experience the insights that can be an inherent product of many hours of apparent drudgery, while at the same time learning that research success is not easy or free, but is achieved with the investment of substantial effort and time.
To make sure that KU undergraduates have the best possible educational experience, there needs to be an integrative intellectual product that students produce through their work. This product would be our institutional signature attesting to our commitment to the program. The details of such a product have been considered by a recent committee, the Task Force on Undergraduate Research at KU, chaired by Craig Martin. The committee’s charges included considering certification for and centralization of undergraduate research experiences. A proposed vehicle for presenting this work is described by Linda Luckey and Beth Warner on page 5 of this newsletter. Whatever form it finally takes, the work will be a reflective account of the full range of the experience. It will report on the careful and painstaking work of gathering evidence, and there will be analysis and interpretation of what the evidence tells us. In an important sense, these projects will often be less about findings and more about the nature of students’ inquiry and thinking in the context of the field being studied.
When we recruit students to KU, we point out that research is a distinctive strength. As we move forward with expanding the scope and visibility of student research work, we can make it clear to all that this is not a shortcut to finding volunteer help. Students are significantly engaged in the work that we call research. They will be framing a way of knowing grounded in the perspective of an intellectual field, and they will be gathering motivation for a life of informed but skeptical inquiry beyond their time at KU.
