Purpose: Approaching mentoring from the theoretical tradition of continental pedagogy and contrasting it to the neoliberal organization of the academy, this paper aims to analyze how the Croatian higher education document framework constructs mentoring graduate and postgraduate students' research projects. Design/methodology/approach: The analysis…

This study explores the effect the U.S. National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (NSF REU) programs have on REU participants and other undergraduate student researchers and how their success was measured. The authors conducted interviews with 10 principal investigators (PIs) of REU programs and surveyed undergraduate…

What is research and who is a researcher? Why engage in research and what is the value of research? Paradigms of Research for the 21st Century explores multiple questions relating to the nature and process of educational research. The book offers an insightful and detailed account of Western and non-Western philosophical traditions and…

Final year individual projects have always been the culmination of a student's curriculum at university, requiring knowledge and skills gained over the whole course. However, with time, their scope and aim have moved from a more traditional research-oriented one to a more modular structure, where specific skills are demonstrated and assessed. This…

Purpose: Securing ethical approval can be a frustrating and opaque experience for some creative practice research students who may find the processes required of them not well suited to their specific inquiry. This can lead to an erosion of trust between students and their institutions. This paper aims to synthesize perspectives representing both…

This study aims to give chemistry students a deeper understanding of electron shielding and quantum transitions by interpreting the characteristic X-ray lines. There is a popular misunderstanding among learners and even teachers in which an outer-shell electron fills a vacancy in the inner shell, releasing some of its energy as an X-ray photon.…

Undergraduate research experiences are key to preparing STEM students for a range of careers and graduate programs, and to impacting retention in STEM. Providing undergraduate research experiences can be challenging for institutions due to the high cost associated with equipment and reagents, lab space, and research mentors. In this study, we…

In this dissertation, I present readers with three studies about the ways in which science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research experiences impact undergraduate learning, perspectives, and academic/career activities. In the first two studies I focus on this topic by investigating the ways in which undergraduates were impacted…

While scholars have found that undergraduate involvement in research is beneficial, the lack of such experiences in the social sciences and humanities is glaring. This paper analyzes how an emphasis on community through cohort models impacts undergraduate student experience in research, taking from the Emerging Scholars Program, an…

One of the tools middle school SBAE teachers can use to deliver the total program is research-based SAEs, for which students can receive recognition through the FFA Agriscience Fair. This study examined why middle school SBAE teachers implemented the FFA Agriscience Fair into their programs. This study built on previous literature in this area,…

The number of students interested in pursuing STEM in post-secondary institutions is on the decline. This is due to several factors, one being a lack of effective and innovative science enrichment (summer or after-school) programs for high school students (Baran et al., 2019; Kong et al., 2014). While traditional lecture-based science courses…

The main purpose of this paper was to follow the development of research units in Israeli colleges of education: To learn about the challenges they faced, their contribution to individual teacher educators as well as to teacher education colleges' research capacity. The study is autoethnographic. Thirteen veteran research unit members authored 46…

Integrating humanities and arts into STEM has been suggested to better prepare students for the workforce. Studies have shown that improvisation (abbreviated as improv), an educational program from humanities and arts, can potentially improve engineering pedagogy and learning. However, little is known about improv's impact on developing…

In higher education, online students are often precluded from research assistantships that are more accessible for campus-based students. At a highly ranked institution for online learning, we developed the Undergraduate Research Program (URP) to address this gap in opportunities for online students. The URP is designed to engage fully distanced…

Abstract Targeted metagenomics is a rapidly expanding technology to analyze complex biological samples and genetic monitoring of environmental samples. In this research field, data analytical aspects play a crucial role. In order to teach targeted metagenomics data analysis, we developed a 4-week inquiry-driven modular course-based undergraduate…