Core questions: How can we introduce our students to more sophisticated thinking and responsible action through the design of the undergraduate experience? What should we expect of a college graduate?

Underlying Questions:

a. Is there anything really different about the undergraduate experience at a major research university for most undergraduates? Can the research environment and its assets be made a more integral component of the experience of all students? If so, is this a good idea and how might we accomplish this?

b. What do recent studies and reports about the requirements of the 21st century workforce tell us about how we should educate our students and what they should know and be able to do when they graduate? What is timeless about a good education and what is acutely timely? How much do we need to change our expectations, our goals, the design of our curriculum and the way we assess students? How does a research mindset fit into the portraits being provided of an educated person for the 21st century?

c. Do our current courses introduce students to disciplines or only to the products (i.e. abstracted subject matter) of a discipline? Do students get to talk about ideas or do they just hear about them? Can you really learn something without talking about it and exploring it, without knowing where the material came from and how it has been shown to be valid? Must we always speak in the privileged discourse of a field (thus bewildering our students) or can we use plain and simple talk for complex and subtle ideas? Is something more real to us if the answer is NOT in the back of the book or if it does not turn out the way we expected it to? (Lovely questions posed by Gerald Graff in Clueless in Academia: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.)

d. How will the recent work of the Reinvention Center and scholars of teaching and learning help us in answering questions like this?

The preset answer to the first set of questions invoked in this conference is “by engaging them in a research-based education.” What does that mean? The integration of research and education can be thought about in at least five ways.

1. Whenever we invest in research capacity and contribute original work to a field, we are creating an educational asset. This asset can be deployed in a number of ways: to provide research experiences for undergraduate students, high school students and high school and middle school teachers and to promote public understanding of science, research and technology. In some instances, the research activities themselves can be designed in such a way that the general public can also contribute to the work, through gathering of observations and data.
2. The results of research on cognition, learning and development can be incorporated into educational practice to promote more effective approaches to teaching and learning. This can be most effectively accomplished when researchers and practitioners work together to define problems of special importance, gather data and interpret those data. This process of collaborative research also facilitates the application of research findings to practice while making it possible for the realities of practice to challenge theory and define research goals. One necessary condition for the integration of knowledge about learning into education is the attitude of faculty and teachers toward the integration of research and education itself. Researchers must take education seriously, and educators must take research seriously.
3. The emerging pattern of work on teaching and learning is acquiring the qualities of any scholarly contribution, hence the label “the scholarship of teaching and learning.” It derives its inspiration in part from concepts of the scholar practitioner who attends to the realities of his or her practice and seeks to advance the profession, in this case, the professional obligations of an educator (Donald Schon), and in part from the application of the ideas and methods of various disciplines to the study of the undergraduate experience and learning, both in the context of the disciplines and in the larger interdisciplinary and integrative context of general education.
4. In some instances, research can be incorporated into the design of educational experiences for all students, not just those who can be accommodated on a research team or in a field or laboratory research project. This can be done through such pedagogies as service-learning, inquiry-based learning and project-based learning.
5. In all cases, a scholarly mindset appropriate to a particular field and an approach that promotes an exploration of the ideas and tools of different scholarly perspectives can be introduced into the classroom so that students learn in a mode comparable to that employed by an investigator, even if the work they are doing is not an original contribution to the literature or knowledge base of the field. It is possible to explore the mindset and habits of a researcher and scholar without doing original work.

We can envision a pattern of inquiry across the stages of an undergraduate experience in which the complexity and challenge of the intellectual work rises steadily while the potential impact of the work on others expands as well. I have called this The Dewey Line, a line drawn at a roughly 45 degree angle on a graph of increasing intellectual challenge and scholarly authenticity on the Y-axis and increasing value and complexity of the problem to be addressed and the potential societal impact on the X-axis.

How can research be introduced into the curriculum?

The curricular support for the development of a scholarly mindset can come from the design of courses that explore how people think and work in the context of a particular discipline. Appropriate augmentation of individual experience through the development of learning communities put together to resemble a scholarly community can reinforce the impact of individual courses or groups of courses.

A gradient of experience can be reflected in the nature of the research experience over the different phases of the undergraduate experience. At the freshman or sophomore level, a student may be immersed in a research group. In the sciences, for example, a student may be learning techniques and performing measurements or preparing equipment under the supervision of more experienced undergraduate students, graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. At this stage, the student is absorbing a research/scholarly mindset and learning some basic research skills, but is working on someone else’s problem.

At the next level, students may be given the opportunity to experience “real” research as a member of a laboratory group. This may be summarized and expanded through a variety of capstone experiences or senior thesis options that introduce students to the rigors of authentic scholarship where the problem is their own and the work is their own.

Why is it important to provide research experiences?

There are many reasons to introduce students to research experiences, either as part of a course or as an adjunct to the curriculum. Among the reasons overheard at this conference were:

a. To identify and encourage future scholars
b. To provide a successful transition from early phases of education to a more demanding level of advanced study where students take increasing responsibility for their own educational agenda and progress
c. To explore career options (i.e. Do I like doing research?)
d. To learn what research can and cannot provide and how to use the results of research and apply them to practical problems and professional practice
e. To learn that knowledge is not static and that it expands endlessly
f. To learn how to handle competing claims and to realize that there are no perfect answers to vitally important questions
g. To set in place the opportunity for students and instructors to work together differently and benefit from each other’s expertise and interests—to reap the benefit of interactions with scholars who are creating new knowledge, defining a field, contributing the work that will be in the textbooks and journals a couple of years from now and to begin to see into the discipline of a scholarly mind (to welcome students to Burke’s Parlor)
h. To open up the mysterious process of where ideas come from and how an active mind works and what it means to explore ideas through the lenses of particular disciplines or in the integrative context of many disciplines.
i. To build a good resume

Some attention was given to the challenge of moving students from the position of novice (absorbing other people’s ideas and learning to discern the complexity of things) to the portfolio of an expert (challenging, questioning and contributing new ideas). Being good at absorbing other people’s ideas is not a predictor for being good at doing original work. A failure to figure out the difference between the two (i.e. absorption vs. original thinking) has led many a student to get stuck at the advanced level and fail to complete a degree because the qualities that predict success at an advanced level are different from what ensures success at the undergraduate level for most students.

What challenges face our research universities today as they seek to embrace their responsibilities for providing exemplary undergraduate education? Unanswered questions that underlie much of what was discussed at the conference.

• In what ways is a major research university different culturally and intellectually from other postsecondary institutions, and what role can and should our research community play in advancing undergraduate education and in exploring how best to integrate research and education?
• How does the research university itself learn and from whom? What are its broader responsibilities as the source of most of the nation’s higher education faculty? How should we prepare our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom will not seek to pursue a career in a research university or even in the Academy?
• Why do we want to place research at the heart of the undergraduate experience and what will that mean in practice? Not only do our institutions have limited capacity to engage students in the scholarly work of faculty (usually 10% or less of students do original work of this kind), but many students lack an interest or an inclination to do so. What do we want our students to learn from their research experiences and what are some alternative ways to accomplish those goals that match up better with disciplinary differences (many mathematicians, humanities and arts faculty work alone and would have trouble finding appropriate opportunities for students) as well as with student career interests. How about business majors, social work majors, engineers who must engage in the work of the scholar practitioner but will probably be disinclined to do “basic research.”
• Might we consider replacing the word “research” with the more expansive term “scholarship” as Ernest Boyer used it, allowing students to experience discovery, integration, interpretation and application of knowledge throughout their undergraduate years?

Resources/References:

Publication

Graff, G. (2003) Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.