1. Preparing Students for Successful Capstone Experiences

Contexts | Undergraduate Research Trajectory | Case examples |
Campus-wide Integration and Support | Challenges and Recommendations

Contexts

Undergraduates who attend a research university such as Berkeley have the opportunity to engage with scholars who are internationally recognized for their contributions to the advancement of knowledge. Intellectual discovery shapes the undergraduate experience: in large-lecture classes that are informed by cutting-edge research; in small seminars that allow undergraduates to engage in inquiry under faculty mentorship; and in laboratories, in libraries, in the field, and in the studio, where undergraduates apprentice on faculty-directed research projects and, eventually, initiate their own projects, often as a senior-year capstone experience. Of graduating seniors responding to the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES, Spring 2003), 95% rated developing research skills as an important educational goal. Of these, 44% reported having made considerable progress on this goal; 33% reported some progress; and 14% reported some, little, or no progress. The same survey asked students to rate the importance and frequency of various types of undergraduate research experiences. Eighty-five percent of graduating seniors cited taking a small research-oriented seminar as important, with 54% reporting having done so in the current academic year. They also considered important conducting their own research as part of a course (90%) or independent study (77%), with 82% and 44% respectively having done so. Eighty percent rated working on a faculty-mentored research project as important, with 43% having done so. Overall, the results show that students rate such experiences as important, and that by the senior year we are reaching a significant number of students with such opportunities. However, we still need to close the gap for seniors who want such experiences and have not yet had an opportunity to engage in them.

In Reinventing Undergraduate Education (Boyer Commission, 1998), the capstone experience is defined as follows: “All the skills of research developed in earlier work should be marshaled in a project that demands the framing of a significant question or set of questions, the research or creative exploration to find answers, and the communication skills to convey the results to audiences both expert and uninitiated in the subject matter.” The report further suggests that students will be best prepared for the demands of the capstone experience when earlier coursework is inquiry based. At Berkeley, we define capstone experiences broadly to encompass projects relevant to a wide range of disciplines, including design, creative, or service-learning projects, as well as traditional research projects. In addition, we note that mentored student research can culminate in a variety of products, including capstone teaching experiences in which students develop and lead student-initiated courses. Capstone experiences are valuable not simply for the opportunity they afford the student to demonstrate mastery of skills and knowledge in a specific discipline. They represent the culminating expression of a broad liberal arts education and the outcomes that prepare students for future success in a wide range of personal, professional, and civic endeavors.

At the time we launched this self-study, we recognized that the campus did not have in place a reliable centralized mechanism for tracking participation in undergraduate research activity, in preparation for and including capstone experiences. Indicators from the Quality of Undergraduate Education Assessment Project (QUEAP) gave us some picture of current activity, but they also captured some activity that was not research and failed to capture other activity that was. To identify more reliable data on undergraduate research activity, we designed and conducted as part of the WASC self-study a Departmental Undergraduate Education Survey in Fall 2001. This survey included a section on capstone experiences, using the above definition from the Boyer Report, and was designed to establish baseline data on availability of capstone opportunities at the departmental level. Results indicated that 75% of departments (N=56) offer capstone experiences to their honors students and 49% (N=37) to non-honors students, some required and others optional. Detailed results and analysis of this survey are available.

In parallel to this campus effort, the University of California, through the system-wide Council of Undergraduate Deans and Vice Provosts, began to explore a strategy for quantifying undergraduate research activity taken for credit as a first step to better understanding credit and non-credit opportunities for undergraduate research activity. Guidelines for identifying advanced and apprenticeship undergraduate research courses are currently under development. The campus and system-wide efforts to define and catalog undergraduate research activities have been mutually reinforcing and reciprocal.

System-wide and campus efforts to quantify undergraduate research activity have underscored the need for clear definitions of what is meant by undergraduate research. Such a conceptual framework enables

• undergraduates to set personal goals at the outset of their academic careers and plan ahead to take advantage of research opportunities;
• faculty and departments to become more explicit about their research-based student learning objectives, to develop specific ways to evaluate intended learning outcomes, and to partner with academic support units to promote the development of research competencies in their students;
• the administration to make informed decisions about allocating available resources to support these educational goals and objectives on both a unit- and campus-wide level; and
• the campus and University as a whole to bring greater visibility to the place of undergraduate research in the educational experience, to assess how well we are meeting our objectives for undergraduate participation in research, and to communicate goals and successes to various stakeholders.

The Working Group examined a broad range of evidence of curricular and co-curricular undergraduate research practices and activities from across the disciplines. It reviewed the quantitative data on capstone experiences from the Departmental Undergraduate Education Survey. It then conducted further qualitative investigation (e.g., review of departmental websites; informal interviews with department chairs, faculty, staff, and students; examination of course syllabi, assignments, student work, and other assessment materials when available) in a smaller subset of departments representing a range of variables (e.g., size, discipline). To supplement this material, the Working Group investigated key programs and units on campus that are supporting undergraduate research experiences in partnership with or as an adjunct to departmentally based experiences. In the remainder of the essay, we outline the resulting conceptual model, discuss the model in relationship to several case examples, and conclude with a series of recommendations that will enable us to continue to make progress as a campus in this area.

The Undergraduate Research Trajectory

The development of undergraduate research competencies leading to a capstone experience can be divided into three stages:

• Stage One: Exposure
• Stage Two: Experience
• Stage Three: Capstone

As students progress through these three stages, the sophistication and quality of the research they produce continually increase. The process for moving successfully through the stages begins with the engagement of students as intelligent consumers of research, that is, students who know how to find, read, critique, and judge the quality of research studies and reports. With these foundational research skills in place, students are ready to move towards the production of their own original research. To define the stages of undergraduate research development and the student learning objectives associated with each stage, we have identified three dimensions that we think are especially critical markers of students' engagement as producers of research:

• The extent to which answers to research/creative problems that students engage are known or unknown.
• The extent to which the research/creative process is directed by the faculty mentor or self-directed.
• The extent to which the research/creative product has a potential audience beyond the instructor and classroom.

Each of these dimensions represents a continuum. Progress along these dimensions may not proceed uniformly, and the stages may at times overlap or correspond to different class years for different students. In addition, multiple variables will affect actual student learning outcomes. These include (1) the culture and nature of the disciplines, (2) individual students’ interests and inclinations, (3) individual students’ skills and abilities, and (4) types of research activities conducted. Recognizing these variables, the campus has articulated the following goals for our students:

• To offer every student the opportunity to have a capstone experience if he or she so chooses.
• To maximize students’ progress in relationship to all three dimensions of engagement so they are both more likely to choose a capstone experience and are better prepared to have a successful experience.

Stage One: Exposure

In stage one, students learn to recognize a good research question and are exposed to methods of approaching the problem, including identifying, gathering, evaluating, and synthesizing evidence, information, and ideas. In some cases, students may be engaging questions the answers to which are already known; however, learning experiences that actively engage them in the process of re-discovery help them gain a deeper understanding of the research process. In this stage, faculty members typically are fully responsible for structuring the research/creative problem and the approach used for investigation/creative exploration. Through engagement with exposure-level activities, students begin to gain an understanding of the process by which knowledge is created and the ability to distinguish important questions from unimportant questions in a given field of knowledge. Some students may seek exposure-level experiences in several disciplines as part of the process of developing the focus and commitment required for entry into the upper division.

Stage Two: Experience

Students in this stage have typically committed to a major and are gaining discipline-appropriate tools and knowledge through coursework and co-curricular apprenticeships. Experience-level activities offer students practice formulating research questions and developing a plan for approaching research problems, the answers to which may be either known or unknown. Students in this stage acquire research skills such as conducting a literature review, coding data, or learning qualitative interviewing techniques, paleography, or laboratory bench skills. They may have opportunities to practice structuring a research/creative problem and plan for investigation/exploration, which they execute under close faculty supervision. Or they may contribute to the conceptual development, execution, and analysis of an ongoing research/creative project that a faculty member has defined. In either case, they continue to refine their ability to develop questions that have significance, to acquire skills in research and creative exploration to find answers, and to learn discipline-appropriate tools for presenting the results of inquiry to an audience beyond the faculty instructor.

Stage Three: Capstone

Students undertaking a capstone project marshal the skills needed to develop their own research or creative questions and to initiate investigations and explorations the outcome of which is largely unknown. The level of independence of the capstone phase will vary considerably: some disciplines are characterized by a high degree of autonomy and solo work; others typically generate knowledge in the context of teamwork or collaboration. Regardless, the work of this phase allows students to organize and synthesize knowledge and skills acquired in a wide array of settings and situations in the course of their undergraduate career under the guidance of a mentor. Capstone experiences also typically include an opportunity to present the results of inquiry or creative engagement to a larger audience. This audience may vary widely: a classroom symposium, publication in a student-run journal, participation at a professional conference, presentation as part of a student-initiated course. At the undergraduate level, the most important criterion is the opportunity to communicate with a broader rather than a specialized, professional community.

Case Examples

We have chosen four cases to illustrate several concrete ways the above model has been put into practice on the Berkeley campus. The cases represent a range of disciplines, numbers of majors/nonmajors served, and approaches to the capstone. The departments offer a variety of experiences incorporating research, artistic creation, and service-learning dimensions, as well as opportunities for public presentation in a variety of communication modalities. The Environmental Sciences Program and the Department of History are noteworthy because they require the capstone experience for all of their majors. The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies offers an optional senior thesis that can take a variety of forms including research and/or production, as well as options for capstone production experiences for many majors and nonmajors alike. The McNair Scholars Program, a nondepartmentally based undergraduate research program, is designed specifically to address issues of diversity in the learning environment.

Environmental Sciences

History

Theater, Dance and Performance Studies

McNair Scholars Program

Campus-wide Integration and Support

The case studies above present several locally developed models. We also recognize the need for institutional structures that can bridge these local efforts. In 1997, the campus established the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) to "direct students to existing opportunities, network established programs, and assist in the development of new campus opportunities for research." The Office houses the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP), which pairs faculty with undergraduates who apprentice on cutting-edge research projects, as well as a number of newer programs, including the Haas Scholars Program, the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program, and the Travel Grants for Undergraduate Research. OUR oversees two campus-sponsored undergraduate journals, Berkeley Undergraduate Journal and Berkeley Scientific Journal, and provides additional support for other independent student journals.

OUR also provides resources and forums designed to provide more coordination among the many campus programs that support undergraduate research, while still maintaining the autonomy of these programs in their respective units. These include an Undergraduate Research @ Berkeley web portal that links students to undergraduate research opportunities and resources on campus and beyond; a campus-wide undergraduate research calendar; a roundtable of directors of undergraduate research programs, the Berkeley Undergraduate Research Consortium (BURC), which meets to coordinate undergraduate research activities on the campus; and a series of workshops and print- and web-based resources designed to assist undergraduates in reaching certain learning objectives (e.g., developing proposal writing skills) and to maximize their participation in research while at Berkeley. In 2002-03, nearly 900 students enrolled in research programs directly administered by OUR; more than 1,500 attended focused information sessions, forums, and workshops run by OUR staff. Many more found affiliated programs through the OUR website, listserv, and publications. OUR‘s programs and services are designed to partner with academic departments and units, providing funds, resources, and advising that facilitate students’ development along the research trajectory. In its six years of existence, OUR has realized many, but not all, of the objectives outlined in its initial budget request. A future goal is to develop more effective assessment procedures to better understand the impact of OUR on student learning.

Challenges

Many innovative opportunities are available to our undergraduates. However, we have also identified some key obstacles:

• A high student-faculty ratio relative to our peer comparison private institutions, leading to challenges in providing one-on-one faculty-student mentoring.
• The tendency for undergraduate research innovations to be isolated and the result of individual faculty entrepreneurs rather than coordinated efforts to promote innovative curricular and co-curricular change at the departmental, college, or campus level.
• A lack of infrastructure for faculty to share pedagogical strategies and practices in working with undergraduates on research activities.
• A lack of a well-developed incentive/reward system for faculty that communicates the value and importance of undergraduate research mentoring.
• Insufficient research and writing skills in students entering the capstone experience and a diversity of levels of preparation leading to disparate levels of student success.
• A lack of assessment mechanisms to help us track both participation in and learning effectiveness of undergraduate research on both a local and campus-wide level.

To continue to expand and strengthen the campus’s commitment to providing research-based learning opportunities leading to the capstone experience, we offer the following specific recommendations.

Recommendations

1. Provide incentives and resources to support departments to develop undergraduate research opportunities leading up to and including capstone experiences. Many of the innovations occurring on campus are spearheaded by individual faculty. Incentives and resources could be designated to institutionalize change at the departmental/college level, fostering undergraduate research trajectories that are transparent to students.

Current Efforts: The Educational Initiatives Award, begun in 1993, recognizes outstanding undergraduate education initiatives undertaken at the department (rather than individual faculty) level that have the potential to serve as campus models.

2. Remove obstacles to undergraduate engagement with interdisciplinary research and promote inter-departmental and inter-unit collaborations. As research becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, we need to ensure that students can engage problems in a cross-disciplinary context. The campus could encourage partnerships not only between departments, but also with other units (e.g., library collections, organized research units).

Current Efforts: The Townsend Center for the Humanities has received new funding to develop interdisciplinary research programs, which will provide undergraduates with opportunities to participate in individual and faculty research through interdisciplinary courses, one-on-one apprenticeships, and team-research projects in areas that link the humanities to the environment, human rights, new media, biotechnology, health, and medicine.

3. Develop new ways to support faculty wishing to redesign existing or create new courses with research-based components and create more venues for faculty to exchange information about innovative teaching practices. Strategies could be found to encourage sharing of best practices in promoting undergraduate research activity, through faculty forums, web-based exchanges, and other venues.

Current Efforts: The pilot Mellon Faculty Institute on Undergraduate Research supports faculty creating innovative research-based courses and serves as a forum for faculty from diverse disciplines to engage in pedagogical inquiry and dialogue.

4. Help students reflect on their own development as researchers across their undergraduate careers. The campus could explore options such as e-portfolios for encouraging students to reflect on the development of their research competencies across multiple courses and co-curricular experiences.

Current Efforts: The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research asks students to submit a 500-750 word reflective essay describing their research strategies and use of library tools and resources as part of their applications.

5. Reward faculty who engage in effective research mentoring of undergraduates through the merit/tenure process and other meaningful forms of recognition. The Working Group endorsed the addition of criteria related to undergraduate research mentoring as part of the latest revision of the faculty bio-bibliography, used in the campus’s merit, promotion, and tenure process, and recommended that such contributions (both curricular and co-curricular) carry weight in the overall evaluation process. The development of other forms of recognition is also encouraged.

Current Efforts: The Letters and Science Awards for the Distinguished Research Mentoring of Undergraduates are examples of meaningful recognition.

6. Leverage mentoring resources for students engaged in undergraduate research by fostering communities that creatively engage faculty, post-docs, graduate students, advanced peers, librarians, and other professional staff in the mentoring process. Expanding the availability of quality mentored research experiences will depend on creatively leveraging all of the campus’s mentoring resources. Collaborative communities that complement faculty mentorship have long been the norm in the laboratory-based disciplines and are becoming more common in other disciplines. The campus’s extensive library collections, museums, organized research units, and centers could serve as sources of professional research mentors, not simply of research materials.

Current Efforts: The participation of undergraduates in the Regional Oral History Office is one example of such a collaborative model.

7. Focus on developing communications competencies as part of preparation for and execution of the capstone experience. The adequacy of written, oral, visual, and graphical communications skills in undergraduate students remains a perennial issue. Capstone courses provide appropriate vehicles to focus on discipline-specific communications skills at the upper-division level. All departments could be encouraged to build such opportunities into all of the research trajectory stages, so that graduating students have mastered not only content but also presentation of that content in forms suitable to their disciplines.

Current Efforts: Many campus departments are adding opportunities for public presentation of the capstone and other research in symposia, poster sessions, and web- and print-publications (see Departmental Undergraduate Education Survey results). As a result, 25% of seniors responding to the Spring 2003 Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) reported having presented research findings at a conference or symposium during the current academic year. During Undergraduate Research Month in April, the campus publishes a calendar of undergraduate research poster sessions, presentations, symposia, and related public events.

8. Continue to coordinate and expand central academic student services supporting undergraduate research. The campus could continue to expand support for coordinated student services designed to partner with departments to promote undergraduate research. Such support includes funding for student research and travel to conferences/field-study; tracking of campus-wide data on research participation; staffing for academic support functions such as helping students find research mentors and teaching proposal writing skills; and encouraging, publicizing, and coordinating individual departmental efforts to increase campus-wide visibility.

Current Efforts: The Undergraduate Research @ Berkeley website is a virtual gateway to student support services for undergraduate research campus-wide.

9. Evaluate how well departments help students develop research skills as part of regular academic program review. The program review process could examine how well departments maximize student engagement with the three stages and three dimensions of research.

Current Efforts: Under the Academic Program Review Interim Guidelines, the self study to be submitted by academic units undergoing review includes a new section on undergraduate participation in research. To strengthen this effort, the campus could develop improved assessment tools to enable them to conduct such a self-evaluation.

10.  Improve campus-wide mechanisms for tracking participation in undergraduate research, assessing how well we are meeting our objectives for students, and evaluating the impact of such experiences on student learning. In addition to program reviews that happen infrequently, we need better mechanisms for ongoing evaluation and assessment.

Current Efforts: The Departmental Undergraduate Education Survey conducted in Fall 2001 included a set of questions on undergraduate research and capstone experiences. In addition, the UC System is developing a more effective method for measuring participation in advanced and apprentice undergraduate research courses. Both of these efforts can inform the institutionalization of campus measures to document our progress; however, we need to develop more systematic procedures to assess the impact of capstone courses on student learning.

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