I wrote yesterday’s post about the undergraduate research study very quickly, basically just to note the existence of the survey. It’s sparked some good discussion, though, and I’d like to take another post or two to expand on what I think it means.
Of course, the beneficial effect of undergraduate research seems almost obvious if you stop to think about it a bit. Undergraduate research works to attract students from all different backgrounds into science for a very simple reason: doing research is nothing at all like the typical science class.
OK, I can really only speak for physics, here, but in general, introductory physics classes are far from exciting. We do what we can to liven the material up, but there’s really no way to get around the fact that a lot of time and effort is spent on little more than repetetive drill. You talk about the appropriate methods for determining the motion of a block sliding on an inclined plane, and then you do eight hundred homework problems involving blocks sliding on inclined planes.
To some degree, this is inescapable– those repeated exercises are used to establish a pattern of thought that is a necessary prerequisite for moving on to more interesting material. There are essential skills that can really only be learned by slogging through masses of algebra, and some element of this will always be present in physics classes.
The problem is, this creates a false impression of what physics is. A lot of students– including some of our best students– get turned off by what looks like endless and pointless repetition. They get the idea that physics is all about blocks sliding on planes, and decide they don’t want anything to do with it. Even in the intermediate level classes, they come away with the wrong ideas– that physics is all about manipulating Lagrangians all day long, or normalizing wavefunctions.
The students who are unsure about the subject coming in end up dropping away, even though some of them are extremely talented. They go to fields whose benefits are more immediately obvious. The only students who stick it out in physics are the ones who enjoy the form of classes, and those who come in already motivated, and see the class work as a necessary chore to get to the good stuff.
We don’t do a terribly good job of showing students what the subject is really like, on the professional level, through our classes. I’m not sure any field of academia does this all that well, but physics in particular is miles away from getting the right idea across in class, and I think that’s a problem. We’re not doing a good job of putting forward what’s really attractive and interesting about doing physics, particularly at the introductory level where we need to “hook” students.
And that’s one of the things that undergraduate research is good for. It allows us to introduce students to the very best that physics has to offer– the chance to work on fundamental problems about how the universe functions, the challenge of finding clever ways to get past obstacles that come up, the sense of not knowing exactly what will happen when you run an experiment or a simulation. Those are the fun bits of the subject, and more importantly, those are more representative of what physicists do than blocks sliding on planes.
A number of people have suggested that the findings in the SRI studies are a pure selection effect– that the students who get involved in research are the ones who are already motivated to study science, and would’ve gone to grad school anyway. There’s some of that here, I’m sure, but that’s not the whole story– for one thing, they explicitly claim that research experiences develop “new” expectations of going to graduate school. And anecdotally, I can say that we’ve had very good luck on the local level with getting students who are sort of iffy about physics to become majors by getting them involved in research projects at an early stage. Some of our best majors are physics majors because we offered them research opportunities as first-year students.
That’s why we make such a big effort toward getting students involved in undergraduate research in the first place. I think our research program is really one of the biggest selling points we have to offer, and is a big part of the increase we’ve seen in the number of majors over the last several years.
Of course, making undergraduate research work is a non-trivial problem, but that’s a subject for another post.