Hey, bloggy pals. CF and I were talking about this at the end of last semester, and she suggested that I might do a post about this topic to see what folks had to say. At our institution (as I’m sure is the case at many of yours) there is a push toward involving students in research. However, one thing that is … a challenge… in our context is the communication of what “counts” as undergraduate research in our fields.
Long story short: institutional leaders value “involving undergraduates in research” inasmuch as it means having them as co-authors on publications. Which is grand in the sciences. Or even in some social sciences disciplines. Or in Business, or in Health Professions disciplines. It doesn’t make so much sense in the humanities, though. Because, well, we tend to do the whole “single author” thing.
Another complicating factor is the fact that when we humanities folks use students (graduate students or undergraduates, really, but undergrads are really the focus of my questions here), we use them for things like photocopying, reading, compiling, and editing. All things which the powers at be see as “not research.” Except… um… yeah, that’s all intrinsic to what research means in my work. So. On the one hand, I’d really like to involve students in my research. But what that means is having them do shitty clerical-style tasks, which really are a lot of what research means for me, but that doesn’t count as “student research” for those who decide such things. (Worth noting: I had “research” opportunities such as those described above as both an undergrad and a grad student, and I never got a co-author credit, and yet those things were HUGELY important to my professional trajectory.)
So my questions for you all are these:
- If you’re in research that tends to be single-author (humanities folks, but others as well if this applies), have you found ways to involve students in research that are seemingly not clerical, and which your institutions value?
- Is there a way to “spin” the kinds of tasks I describe above as being “valuable” learning opportunities for students to people who don’t see those opportunities as valuable?
- Out of curiosity, for those of you in co-authoring fields, what sorts of things do students do in your research in order to get a name as a co-author? Are they really intrinsic to the idea of the research or to the execution of it? And if they aren’t, then why do those people get authoring credit? (I’m seriously asking: it’s foreign to me, given my field.)
- Generally, what do you all see as the point of involving undergraduates in faculty research? What should our goals be, and what should the outcomes be as a result?
- What are your standards for undergraduate research when working for faculty, and what are the benefits to emphasizing it, both for your own research and for your students?
- What is a reasonable metric for deciding what “counts” as a valuable learning opportunity in relation to participating in faculty research? Is it a co-author credit?
What are your thoughts on this? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
My university has been, I think, a pioneer in both Undergraduate Research in general and (more recently) specifically in the humanities. Most often in the humanities, this takes the form not of collaborative publishing but of nurturing and mentoring our students to do their own research, to a point that verges on original scholarship. So a student might take her Honors thesis, or a long seminar paper, and read it at a symposium we organize on campus for them, and then expand it into a proto-journal article to submit to an online undergraduate journal we publish, or take it to the Sigma Tau Delta convention, or submit to one of STD’s journals. I am somewhat ambivalent about what sometimes seems like hyper-professionalization at an absurdly early stage of students’ educational careers. But I like how presenting or publishing their work helps make questions of audience more immediate, and it makes their writing less hypothetical and rarified.
I did work with an undergraduate in editing a collection of letters a couple of years ago. I needed a research assistant, but couldn’t afford to pay one; he was headed off to graduate school, and a publication credit had some appeal to him. So I made him co-editor, and he was a huge help: at transcribing the letters, proofreading against the originals, researching footnotes, preparing the index, etc.
You might be interested in my colleague’s book:
Undergraduate Research in English Studies (Refiguring English Studies)
I’m in the sciences, so I’m not your target demographic, but from the science (CS) perspective of someone who works extensively with undergrad researchers and publishes with them:
3. To be named a co-author, they need to do a great deal of the execution. I come up with the idea/grand plan, they execute the plan: design and run the experiments, analyze the data, etc, with my supervision of course (which starts off heavier and then lightens as they become more self-sufficient). Often they will contribute key ideas: suggesting changes to an underperforming algorithm, coming up with a new experiment idea, etc. I also have them write the first draft of whatever paper they coauthor with me, but often I pretty much have to throw everything out and rewrite it.
4. Part of it is pragmatic for me: since I’m at a SLAC, my collaboration options are undergrads or faculty at other places. Part of it is mentoring, recruitment, and retention. Part of it is pragmatic for the students: if they want to go to grad school, they pretty much need at least one significant research experience to be competitive. Mostly it’s because I enjoy collaborating with undergrads immensely—I love watching them learn how to deal with unstructured, messy problems and becoming mini-experts!
5. I’m not sure what you mean by standards—do you mean what do I expect out of them? I go in with the expectation that we will have something publishable by the end of the summer, or at least be well on the path to publication. And I set up their research experience so that it’s a strong possibility that we’ll have something to publish.
3. Yes, they have to do a substantial amount of intrinsic stuff to get coauthor credit. They can’t just run the regressions I tell them to run or lit review etc. They also have to do some of the writing.
4. If students in my field want to go to a good grad school they must have undergrad experience or they won’t get in.
5/6. In my SLAC there was a push to have students do their own undergraduate research projects. However, I think the experience of just doing RA work may be even more useful to students. They see what professors really do and how long it takes and they get lots of experience doing all sorts of things that they learn how to do that they may not get a chance to if they have to push out something small that is entirely their own (and probably not high quality) in a 3 month period. Our projects generally take years, not months or days. Working as an RA on multiple projects they also get to experience the various stages projects go through.
I get a warm glow from mentoring undergrads. My metric is the kind of skills they pick up while working for me. They get trained in data analysis, statistical packages, literature review, and many other things depending on what projects they’ve been working on. There are also parts of research that some undergrads enjoy that I’m not crazy about so I’m happy to outsource them. (And they get money.)
In history, we use u/grads as research assistants, but they generally don’t get credit as an author, although we would usually give them an acknowledgement in the acknowledgement section. Tasks they would do for us would include compiling bibliographies, photocopying stuff, and source work, such as going to an archive and transcribing docs for us, or, if it was straightforward, looking through an archive to find relevant docs for us, making databases for things that need to be systematically counted or listed, doing keyword searches on online source databases (such as finding all the murder cases between x years) etc. We argue that this teaches fundamental research skills that can be applied if they work in history, but also in many other fields of life (so they could do the ground work for research on any project theoretically). However, unless they actually contribute through analysis of the data, writing part of the text, or in conceptualising the idea, then they don’t get author credit.
Many of the institutions I have been part of though have u/grad journals for publishing in, and we do encourage students to publish their work, especially as many write a dissertation which is ‘original’ research (although of course not usually to the same standard as we’d expect at a higher level).
You should give those little fuckers some text and tell them to beat the fucken shitte out of itte!! And if any of them write anything good, publish it.
Great timing on this, as I am just about to launch a new research project that I was wondering if I could use as u/g research fodder. So FemAvatar has prompted me to rethink what they might do! My problem has always been that my research requires really good foreign language reading skills, not to mention some theoretical background. So my SLAC’s guidelines (something that is original, can be fit into a single term, etc.) never seemed reasonable. That said, FA’s ideas have been inspiring!
That said, I have little to contribute, except to wish that I’d understood research methods more concretely as an undergrad, and the only way I’d have gotten real experience, at a professional level, is just the kind of stuff you are talking about here.
Your issue is important, and this post should be listed under Very Helpful & Important. Thanks for initiating the conversation.
Lit and languages seem like a tough fit because you need all this theoretical and historical background to do much with most texts.
Most of the collaborative research I’ve seen with science folks at my university seems to be sort of repeat the same thing X in a slightly different way. So, for example, students might use a well-tested methodology to look at some issue in a local stream where no one else has really looked. They’ll do the tests and measurements, and create real, new data, and then use the methodology to analyze it. It’s sort of original, and they sure as heck learn a lot.
Or they’ll work as part of an on-going project to test this or that aspect of rat learning.
I don’t know that most textual work works in this way.
The fact I do not collaborate with students was one of the major criticisms brought against me when I went up for tenure. The logic of the scientists/social scientists on the committee was that if my teaching was as strong as it seemed to be, why wasn’t I publishing with students? Like you, I have no answers.
It’s tough to communicate to people in other disciplines (here, history is in the social sciences so we get extra pressure to be more ‘social-science-y’ in such ways). I have recruited grad students to contribute to my pop culture and history volumes but that’s a rare opportunity.
More frequently, I’ve had luck with creating teaching resources in collaboration with senior undergrads: everything from annotated bibliographies to small reference collections that support projects classes work on over and over. . . . Since many of our majors are also pursuing a B.Ed., teaching-related research work has appeal to them and to the administration, at least at present!
There are several opportunities for undergraduates to be involved in research at my university; what that means depends on the program and the professor, though, so students’ contributions can vary dramatically. I’ve worked with three different undergraduate research programs in the past years and the students have been a huge help, doing all those “non-research” tasks that are so necessary for research.
This year is the first year I’ve submitted a manuscript with two of the (former) undergraduates as co-authors (in the past, I’ve mentioned their contributions in the acknowledgements section). What made the difference for me was the degree of autonomy these two students took with the analysis of the data; usually, students get to that point and can’t figure out how to proceed, simply because they don’t have the necessary skills. These students did – and they wrote up their findings, providing a foundation for me to write the submitted manuscript. I thought that was worthy of co-author status! (It is funny to work with them as co-writers, though; they have a hard time correcting the professor!)
So, generally speaking, I am all in favor of undergraduates being involved in research with professors. As I explain to them when they’re transcribing interviews or collating files, the mundanity of organization is just as much a part of the research process as analyzing the data or writing the findings. I think it’s good for them to see the often boring work that creates the articles we write. As for authorship, I think it’s a matter of contribution. If the student has made a significant contribution in the creation of ideas, she deserves to be a co-author – but that also means the student has to agree to write, and that really does mean more work for the professor.
I am collaborating with an undergraduate on an article right now and he is co-author. We are working on all the steps together, from task planning to lit review, brainstorming, generating a conceptual outline, generating a rough draft, workshopping, and revising the final draft. He has exceptional writing abilities for an undergrad and is also very adept with theory and criticism.
I published a paper with several undergrads and swore, Never Again. Their writing, while good for undergrads, was unpublishable. It would have taken less time if I hadn’t involved them so much!
Thank you all for your responses! (And if anybody out there is interested in continuing the conversation – keep the comments coming!)
First of all, I have to say that I admire those of you who have successfully involved students in your research and who take such joy in mentoring undergraduates. Which, let me just say, I really do enjoy mentoring undergrads, but I just don’t know that involving them in my research is the most appropriate way for me to do that in this particular context.
Second, where I think I am on this question right now is that I think that it would likely be more valuable to me to find a way to involve students in my research “under the table” should such a thing seem doable for me, rather than to try to fit the work that I do into the institution’s criteria. Part of this is that I don’t really want to tailor my research agenda to student involvement, at least not at this point in my career, because it seems backwards to me to do so right now. That might change once I attain full professor rank, but for the time being, the primary benefit to involving students in my research would be for the students, and it wouldn’t be a benefit to my research or to scholarship in my field. With that being the case, fitting myself into my institution’s model would feel a bit like the tail wagging the dog. I can envision a scenario in which it wouldn’t be that, but at the moment, I don’t have any students who are strong enough to do more than the grunt-work sorts of things, and I don’t have a project on which a student could meaningfully contribute. I’m not saying that will always be the case, but it is the case right now.
What your comments have done, though, is helped me to think through the possibilities for involving undergrads in research, and that’s a Good Thing.
I am late to the party. I am in the sciences, and undergrads contribute but typically they do a portion of a large project that involves me and at least another postdoc and/or grad student. The undergrad has the grad student as a direct supervisor/point of contact, and there is a postdoc there to help several grad students as well. Undergrads are mostly involved in the execution of a small, well-delineated and well-supervised task. I have had a few papers with undergrads among other coauthors, undergrads contributed typically at the level of a middle-author [in many sciences, authors near the front of the list are lead junior authors (typically the grad student or postdoc that owns the work), whereas the lead senior author is in the back. Going towards the middle of the author list from either end means decreasing contribution].