Helen Walkington

Embedding Research-Based Learning Early in the Undergraduate Geography Curriculum

This article considers the rationale for embedding research and enquiry skills early in the undergraduate geography curriculum and for making these skills explicit to students. A survey of 52 international geography faculty identified critical thinking, framing research questions, reflectivity and creativity as the most challenging research skills to teach early in the undergraduate curriculum. This article provides a range of practical examples illustrating research skill teaching from geography courses internationally. The case studies demonstrate that by embedding research skill development early, scaffolding provided throughout a degree programme can support geography students as they become producers of knowledge.

Geoverse: piloting a National e-journal of undergraduate research in Geography

Abstract This article argues that there is a gap in the research cycle / research process as experienced by undergraduate geography students. In response to this, a national undergraduate research e-Journal of geography called Geoverse has been established and has been piloted initially across four universities. This article outlines the justification for the journal and briefly describes how it functions across diverse institutions. Early research findings are reported from two student groups. The motivations of postgraduate student reviewers (the Editorial Advisory Board) for involvement in the project include the desire to gain experience of the publication process and to feel part of the wider geography academic community. For the students who have written journal articles, the benefits which they reported included a sense of achievement, enhanced writing skills, the ‘coming together’ of knowledge and development of critical skills. Key decisions in the process of creating the journal are discussed and the way in which it has the potential to stimulate curriculum innovation is reported.

Ten Salient Practices of Undergraduate Research Mentors: A Review of the Literature

This paper identifies salient practices of faculty mentors of undergraduate research (UR) as indicated in the extensive literature of the past two decades on UR. The well-established benefits for students involved in UR are dependent, first and foremost, on high-quality mentoring. Mentorship is a defining feature of UR. As more and different types of colleges and universities strive to meet student demand for authentic scholarly experiences, it is imperative to identify what effective UR mentors do in order to ensure student engagement, quality enhancement, retention, and degree-completion. We offer an original analysis of the literature on UR mentoring in which we identify 10 significant “lessons learned,” or evidence-based practices of effective UR mentors that apply broadly across disciplines, students, institutions, and mentoring approaches.

Developing Dialogic Learning Space: The Case of Online Undergraduate Research Journals

This paper explores the learning spaces associated with two geography undergraduate research journals. Wikis provide dedicated spaces for postgraduate reviewers to collaboratively develop constructive feedback to authors creating a supportive online learning environment. In becoming published authors, undergraduates reported that they gained not only academic recognition and curriculum vitae (CV) material but an ability to apply constructive criticism, a desire for more dialogue about their research and the motivation to publish further work in the future. This paper concludes that scaffolding the research writing process can be greatly enhanced by the strategic design of dialogic online learning space.

Graduate attributes: implications for higher education practice and policy

The higher education landscape is shifting under neo-liberal forces that are increasingly aligning the goals of business, government and education. This shift is engendering debate around the world about the role of higher education institutions in producing employable graduates to feed national prosperity in the emerging knowledge economy. As this evolution continues, we need to consider how we enhance generic graduate capabilities as well as the disciplinary expertise of our undergraduate students. Our graduates should possess the knowledge, skills and values to enable them to cope with dynamic employment opportunities, but they must also understand, through the benefits and constraints of their disciplinary perspectives, who they are and how they might contribute positively to the heterogeneity they will encounter in their local, regional and global communities.

Developing Graduate Attributes through Participation in Undergraduate Research Conferences.

Abstract Graduate attributes are a framework of skills, attitudes, values and knowledge that graduates should develop by the end of their degree programmes. Adopting a largely qualitative approach and using semi-structured interviews, this paper outlines students’ experiences at a national undergraduate research conference over three years and evidences the graduate attributes developed. The students demonstrated intellectual autonomy, repurposing their work for presentation to a multidisciplinary audience through conversation with and benchmarking against peers. They gained confidence in expressing their identity as researchers and moved towards self-authorship, consciously balancing the contextual nature of their disciplinary knowledge with intra-personally grounded goals and values.

Reciprocal elucidation: a student-led pedagogy in multidisciplinary undergraduate research conferences

ABSTRACT There is no previous study of the benefits of attending a national multidisciplinary conference dedicated to undergraduate researchers, despite the growing number of such conferences internationally. This paper addresses the gap in knowledge of the learning gains from these conferences, and reveals a student driven learning process, a multidisciplinary signature pedagogy. It presents the results of 90 in-depth interviews with student conference participants conducted over three consecutive years of a multidisciplinary National Conference of Undergraduate Research (2012–2014). This paper uniquely captures the student voice on their perceived learning gains from this experience. The results reveal that some students co-create a pedagogy of Foucauldian reciprocal elucidation, through a sense of ‘unfinishedness’, allowing them to reflect on their own learning in the light of divergent perspectives, questions and frames of reference. Bidirectional exchange of ideas and insights enabled students to ask and answer questions that transformed each other’s thinking, allowing them to arrive at understandings they could not have achieved by themselves. The opportunity to present research in an authentic setting beyond disciplinary and institutional contexts developed students’ skills and confidence, giving additional value over and above the recognised benefits of engaging in research. The undergraduate research conference is framed as a threshold experience for the development of self-authorship. Significant implications for practice include supporting constructive dialogues between students and the creation of authentic and professional multidisciplinary contexts for sharing research.

Evaluating undergraduate research conferences as vehicles for novice researcher development

Purpose - This paper focuses on the undergraduate research conference as its sphere of study and investigates the significance of participation and socialisation in such activities on student attitudes and professional development. Using situated learning to theoretically position the undergraduate research conference as an authentic learning context, connection is also made to the concept of graduate attributes. Design/methodology/approach - The Vitae (2014) Researcher Development Framework (RDF) is used to provide a template for charting the experiences and development of undergraduate students as researchers. This can be applied to short-term activities and programmes as well as to long-term career plans. The insights from 90 undergraduate students participating at three national undergraduate research conferences were obtained through interviews, and thematically analysed to map the students’ skills development against the RDF criteria. Findings - Three main aspects of undergraduate research conference participation were considered particularly important by the students: the value of paper presentations, the value of poster presentations, and the value of the overall conference experience. Within these themes, participants identified a wide range of skills and attributes they felt they had developed as a result of either preparing for or participating in the conferences. The majority of these skills and attributes were able to be mapped against the different domains of the RDF, using a public engagement lens for comparing actual with expected developmental areas. Research limitations/implications - This research helps undergraduate research conference organisers construct programme content and form in such a way that student skills development can be maximised prior to, and during, the course of an event. Learning Developers can also use these findings to help understand the support needs of students preparing to deliver papers at such conferences. So far, little empirical research has examined students’ skills development within the undergraduate research conference arena. Originality/value - The outcomes of this study show the diversity of skills students developed, and the value of the conference format to offer networking practice and to enhance the communication skills which employers value.

Cultivating the Art of Judgement in Students

In this chapter, we wish to suggest that the capability of judgement is something that is valued by employers and this can be developed by students in their academic studies. Some initial research has already been conducted in this area (e.g. see Hennemann and Liefner 2010; Hinchliffe and Jolly 2011) but this has tended to focus on more generic capabilities that are valued by employers. Here, we wish to focus on one of these capabilities in particular – judgement. We would suggest that employers may well take as read a graduate’s ability to understand complex information and ideas; what they are also interested in (and the work by Hinchliffe and Jolly cited above suggests this in particular) is the ability to take ownership and responsibility in the form of giving recommendations and advice. If this is the case then this presents certain challenges for academic teachers in terms of both the organisation of subject matter and its assessment. In particular, disciplines need to be considered as more than bodies of knowledge that needs to be learnt and understood. Rather, we need to see subject disciplines as inhabiting what has been termed the ‘space of reasons’ (McDowell 1994) in which students learn to contest and justify their knowledge.

GEOverse : An Undergraduate Research Journal: Research Dissemination Within and Beyond the Curriculum

This perspective chapter outlines the development of GEOverse, an undergraduate research journal, developed for students to disseminate their research work. This online journal allows students to have a voice as an academic researcher and to close the gap in their experience of the research cycle. A range of UK universities have collaborated to develop an electronic journal for undergraduate research in the Geosciences, and it has inspired developments within the curriculum in a way that is appropriate to each institutional context. Dissemination of research work beyond the curriculum through conferences and publishing journal articles needs to be supported by the development of communication, in particular writing skills, within the curriculum. Increasing demand for publication opportunities by undergraduate geoscience students is evidenced by the increasing number of articles being submitted from overseas institutions.