UndergraduateresearchinselectedUSuniversitiesreportonUSvisit–institutionalcasestudies.docVIP

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH IN SELECTED US UNIVERSITIES REPORT ON US VISIT - INSTITUTIONAL CASE STUDIES Richard Huggins, Alan Jenkins and David Scurry Oxford Brookes University February 2007 Introduction ..The research universities have often failed, and continue to fail their undergraduate populations, thousands of students graduate without seeing the world - famous professors or tasting genuine research. University of Stony Brook (1998, 3) Reinventing Undergraduate Education: Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University. In Scholarship Reconsidered Ernest Boyer (1990, X11) challenged US higher education to “break away out of the tired old teaching versus research debate.” An Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) gives undergraduates the opportunity to participate in the research activities of the institution’s academic staff and postgraduates. The Imperial College scheme, which is modelled on that at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Collier, 1998: 349). This report presents the key findings of a trip to the USA in October 2006 that was funded by the Reinvention Centre with the aim of learning from some of the best US practice in establishing undergraduate research programmes and relatedly of community based undergraduate research programmes. “Undergraduate research” is taken to be a form of curriculum and/or learning that is most strongly based in US higher education. There are variations to its form which include undergraduate students learning through various forms of research based /inquiry learning, often strongly supported by academic staff and at times on faculty research projects, work undertaken in the summer vacation or in semester breaks, at times rewarded by credit and at times by pay and at times involved in a scholarly and research based way with local communities/. Often undergraduate research is for selected students and is outside the formal institutional and departmental curriculum. In some institut