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Purpose of this toolkit

The purpose of this toolkit is to serve as a guide in designing and implementing inclusive undergraduate research experiences (URE) at scale, that is, moving beyond the traditional one-to-one student to mentor model. This guide is intended for both instructors mentoring students in undergraduate research and educational developers, who are supporting such instructors. The pages that follow document our experience engaging with instructors over the course of two years as they transformed their UREs to make them more evidence-based, inclusive, scaffolded, and scalable. We have included our process, program materials, lessons learned, as well as sample artifacts created by the instructors.

How can I use this toolkit?

I am a…Faculty Member, Postdoc, or Instructor 

This toolkit is meant to support instructors who have any interest in designing and implementing undergraduate research. While our focus is on scaling and inclusivity within undergraduate research, the resources and strategies within the toolkit can support all UREs.

Not at all! Our framework activity, which includes a fully worked example, can help you brainstorm what a URE could look like in your discipline. The toolkit as a whole assumes no prior knowledge, and any of the sections can be entry points into brainstorming about undergraduate research. 

This toolkit can help you approach undergraduate research from a new perspective, giving you ideas for how to innovate, scale, as well as how to support your students inclusively. 

We don’t think so! All disciplines do research and creative inquiry to further knowledge and progress within their field, and all disciplines are capable of scoping it appropriately for undergraduate researchers. We firmly believe that all disciplines can benefit from our framework for understanding undergraduate research models, and our faculty Fellows from both cohorts prove it. 

While we hope you find inspiration and actionable takeaways from every section, some aspects may not be applicable to you. These sections in particular may still be relevant and helpful: 

• Some Framework & Design Considerations sections may be applicable, including Groups, Prior Knowledge and Modality. 
• The Implementation section can help ensure you are reaching a broader array of students and supporting them inclusively through the experience
• The Assessing Undergraduate Research section may have helpful ideas for formatively assessing students. 
• Under Artifacts, check out the Learning Objectives by Discipline 
• All sections can help you brainstorm future opportunities!

I am an…Educational Developer

This toolkit contains a mix of top-down design guides and activities from the authors’ perspectives as educational developers, with examples drawn from our faculty fellows. We also include a section specifically for Educational Developers, in which we describe in more detail the faculty programs that we implemented and lessons learned. Finally, we include some data analysis of program artifacts. We hope this toolkit will help you plan programming at your own institution to support instructors in undergraduate research.

Brief History of our Program

In June 2020, our institution was awarded a two-year grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation to create a program to support faculty in addressing the challenges of scaling undergraduate research and broadening student participation in it. Our center for teaching and learning (CTL) and office for undergraduate research and scholarship development (OURSD) created the Innovative Models for Undergraduate Research (IMUR) Faculty Fellows Program, a yearlong fellowship program supporting faculty as they design, implement, and iterate on new ways to conduct undergraduate research (UR). In addition to this partnership across campus units, we were supported by external advisors who came from institutions that differed from ours. They provided feedback and guidance at key intervals during these two years.

IMUR had the following program outcomes: 

1. Create and test new models for undergraduate research and creative inquiry that:
   1. enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion across student experiences, and
   2. can be implemented at scale to make research opportunities more accessible to all.
2. Increase access for students and faculty traditionally underrepresented in research to participate in undergraduate research across all disciplines, schools, and colleges.
3. Generate actionable data on student experiences, including learning outcomes and sense of belonging, and faculty development regarding undergraduate research and mentorship.
4. Build a toolkit of resources and materials for both future faculty cohorts as well as facilitators at other institutions.
5. Disseminate resources and findings on the program and undergraduate research models.

In addition to the competitive fellowship program, we also created a university-wide Faculty Learning Community (FLC) called “Designing Inclusive Undergraduate Research at Scale (DIURS)”. The FLC was open to all faculty and meant to both increase engagement with and cross-disciplinary conversations around undergraduate research, but also to generate interest and applications for the second cohort of IMUR. The FLC consisted of four workshops over consecutive weeks, featuring content and activities pulled from IMUR fellows meetings. We ran two iterations of the FLC during Fall 2021, with 23 faculty participants across our Pittsburgh and Doha-Qatar campuses. An unintended benefit of this FLC was the creation of the undergraduate research generator framework detailed below. 

For more details on IMUR’s program structure and lessons learned, see the “For Educational Developer” section.