Over at Confused on a Higher Level, Melissa has been thinking about undergraduate research:
As a member of the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), over the past few months I’ve gotten several e-mails about the effort by CUR, the Society of Physics Students, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society Committee on Education to adopt a statement on undergraduate research. The CUR statement reads as follows, “We call upon this nation’s physics and astronomy departments to provide, as an element of best practice, all undergraduate physics and astronomy majors a significant research experience.” It is unclear that there is agreement about this proposal, particularly depending on what one means by “significant research experience.” Does significant research imply collaborative work with a faculty member that makes an original intellectual contribution to the discipline? Or can a significant research experience be something more independent that is original for the student, but perhaps not an original contribution to the discipline?
At my undergrad alma mater, formal research was only required for students who wanted a degree with honors (and you had to have department approval to do it). At Union, we require at least one term of research experience of all our majors, and at least two terms for honors students. So I can see the arguments for both approaches.
But this is the Internet, and we have the ability to settle this question with SCIENCE!!! Or, well, pseudo-(social)-science:
(My own thoughts on the matter are complicated, in a way that doesn’t lend itself to a blog post. It’s also sort of difficult to disentangle from questions of internal institutional politics that I’m not willing to discuss.)