The Importance of Undergraduate Research: If you really want to learn, you have to DO
By Dr. Maynard Schaus
Batten Associate Professor of Biology,
Special Coordinator of Undergraduate Research
As I finished up graduate school and began looking for a faculty position, I knew that I was looking for one that stressed teaching, not research. I was fortunate to receive a position at Virginia Wesleyan, which I felt had just the right focus on teaching – not on endless hours of lab work and grant writing. Early on I did have a student who developed her own research project as a senior thesis, but she was the exception, rather than the rule.
However, from the start I did insist that all of my ecology students conduct their own one-month research investigation as their final project for the course. They would come up with an idea (sometimes with my guidance), conduct library research, develop a project and carry it out. They would then present their work to the class as though they were presenting their research at a scientific conference and they would write their paper like a manuscript submitted for publication in a scientific journal. In short, they had to learn to be scientists by actually doing science, not just hearing about it in a lecture. Generally these students would do the project for class and that would be it, but a couple of students decided to greatly expand their ecology projects and turn them into full senior theses, this time with a lot more guidance from me.
Learning by Doing
Around that time, two new biology faculty members hit the ground running with their student- faculty research programs. Along the way I sort of wised up and saw what I had been teaching my ecology students all along – if you really want to learn science, you have to DO science. Facts are important and we have to know about terms to fully understand concepts; however, at its core, science is a process of learning new things, not a list of things to learn.
Perhaps it was my full realization of that fact, perhaps it was positive peer pressure, but regardless of the cause, I began to take on more research students and I pursued my own independent projects again. We were engaged in a collaborative process that examined unanswered questions and challenged students to integrate all that they have learned from their courses and use that to critically think through one idea or question in depth. My students and I presented our findings at conferences, and I even began to pursue a couple of grant opportunities to support that research. In doing so, it became clear that mentoring students in undergraduate research projects is one of the best ways to teach them. Period.
Opportunity for Engagement
One of the goals of the liberal arts is to integrate classroom knowledge and use it to critically think through one idea or question in depth. Undergraduate research allows students and faculty members to engage together in a collaborative process that is examining unanswered questions and challenging students to integrate all that they have learned from their courses.This can be a very distinctive characteristic of a small liberal arts college. At larger schools, research is typically conducted by graduate students and post docs, but at Virginia Wesleyan we have the unique opportunity to engage our undergraduates in this endeavor, regardless of what field they are in. Virginia Wesleyan still has the right focus for me because I am able to engage undergraduates in this unique type of learning and challenge them to take their learning to the next level. In the end, I became a better teacher by engaging my students in research, and my students become better scholars.