Opportunities to Get Involved in Research:
I am always looking for ways to involve undergraduate and graduate students in my research projects. Don’t be shy! If you are curious about any of the projects, or you simply want research experience please contact me (I’m very approachable!).
What do YOU GAIN by Getting Involved? What are the Benefits to YOU?
This is a good question! Let me enumerate a few advantages.
- The fact that you actively and willingly sought out research experience
looks good on a resume. This is true for both undergraduate (ETE or
Psych) and graduate students. For undergraduates in education, taking
this initiative demonstrates that you are committed to education in
ways that go beyond course requirements. It also shows that you want
to understand the research process so that you can be an informed consumer
of research studies to ensure that you apply approaches that are evidence-based
in your classroom. For graduate students, conference presentations
and publications resulting from involvement in research projects are
critical to getting a job as an academic.
- Acquiring research experience can enhance your
application to graduate school, if this is something that you are
considering or plan on doing in the near future. For those of you
who are planning on becoming teachers but know that you will want
to obtain a Master’s degree (e.g.,
Master of Instruction) to enhance your knowledge and skills (or to
increase your pay), research experience can help prepare you for the
program (e.g., you will be reading quite a bit of research articles,
which is not always the case in the bachelor’s program). For
those of you intent on applying to a research-based Masters’ or
Ph.D. program, having research experience (and conference presentations
and publications) increases your opportunity of being selected into
a program. This is one aspect of the application that is weighed heavily
in the admissions process.
- Working closely with a faculty member on a research project enables him/her to have a better sense of your strengths so that it is easier for him/her to write you a strong letter of recommendation. Moreover, this letter can include information about you that instructors may not be able to address, particularly when you are one of 35 students in the class.
Ways in Which You Can Get Involved:
There are three ways in which students can get involved in research projects.
- As a volunteer.
Some undergraduate ETE students have been curious about what goes into a research project and have volunteered some of their time to gain some insight into the process. The time commitment is really up to the student who wants to volunteer (e.g., 3 hours/week for one semester, 20 hours for one semester, 10 hours/week during the winter or summer session, etc.). However, a schedule is always established so that everyone knows what to expect. Undergraduate students will usually work with me and with any graduate students who are also working on the same project. Graduate students often get involved because the project is of interest to them (e.g., it may or may not be related to their dissertation or research interests) or they want a breadth of experience in research. The result of such involvement is often a conference paper and/or a co-authored publication (or several depending on the amount of data and number of projects in which students are involved).
- For academic credit.
Undergraduate students have the option of registering for a special problems course with me (you can ask your academic advisor about this option) that has a special number (usually a 266, 366, or 466 course with my faculty member as the section number). This option involves 3 credit hours, which means that you will be spending the same amount of time on the project as you would for a typical course (includes 3 hours/week of contact hours + 3 hours/week that you would normally spend on reading, homework, and preparing for exams). Activities include meetings, reading and discussing articles or chapters relevant to the research project, and being involved in various phases of the research (e.g., conducting a literature search where you find and retrieve key articles, assisting in the collection, entering, coding, and analysis of data). The final product is determined based on the goals of the student but can include a final paper and/or a co-authorship on a conference paper and/or publication.
- As a research scholar.
Undergraduate students at UD have a wonderful opportunity to be more actively and systematically involved in several phases of research by carving out a small project from a faculty member’s larger research project. The added bonus of this option, compared to the previous two options, is that you get paid for the experience! For example, a junior in the ETE program who had taken the human development course with me decided to apply for the CHEP Summer Scholar program because she wanted to really understand what researchers actually do before they write up the results and share it with educators. She knew that it was important to use the implications research findings in her practice as a teacher. However, she didn’t feel that she understood the research process well enough to make sense of the findings or to determine whether the results were valid enough for her to apply some of the ideas in her future classroom. This student was given a stipend to do a research project with me during the summer of 2005, and presented her work at the UD undergraduate research poster session in May 2006. Note that this poster could be submitted for presentation at a regional or national conference, which could be added to her resume. If you are interested in this option, please click on the “research scholar” or “CHEP Summer Scholar program” links for information about application deadlines and requirements, and contact me about specifics regarding my research projects.
