LiberalArtsOnline Volume 6, Number 8
August 2006
Another summer is drawing to a close, and institutions everywhere are preparing for the onslaught of returning students. The start of the academic year brings quite a change to the mood and energy level at my institution—the campus can seem like a ghost town during the summer months. But if your institution is anything like Wabash College, some students are still around in the summer, employed in various positions on campus and working on research projects with faculty. At Wabash, we refer to these students as summer interns. The Center of Inquiry has been studying Wabash’s on-campus summer internships over the past few years to learn how they impact students and their mentors. We are learning much from this work, and some of our findings have surprised us. This month Anne Bost, one of the researchers for this study, discusses what we learned when we looked at internship design and student/mentor outcomes in undergraduate research projects and other types of on-campus jobs. She also considers the implications of these findings for faculty and staff. This is just one small selection from the larger research project. Look for more information on this study in the coming months, on our website and in LiberalArtsOnline.
--Kathleen S. Wise, editor
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Teaching Across the Divide
by Anne Bost
Research Fellow
Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
Wabash College
Recently I attended a national conference on undergraduate research. Along with several hundred others, I was there to learn how to make undergraduate research experiences better learning opportunities for our students. Speakers and participants raised important questions, questions I myself have been considering in my research: What aspects of collaborative mentor/student research projects contribute the most to student growth? How can we grant more students access to the benefits of undergraduate research? Is there solid evidence to convince students and faculty that the gains are worth the time, and the administration, alumni, and other benefactors that the gains are worth the dollars?
Musing about the interactive sessions, I wandered over to the poster session where I was presenting data from a pilot study of Wabash College’s summer on-campus research program. [a] In this study, we interviewed undergraduate research students and their faculty mentors to better understand how different ways of structuring summer experiences impacted students. We then compared their responses with those of students and staff mentors who worked together in other on-campus environments such as the library, Information Technology Services, Campus Services, or the Business Office.
Our findings were simple but instructive. While research students were more likely than their peers to say that they had learned how to ask and answer research questions, the gains that both groups attributed to their experiences were often remarkably similar. In fact, our interviewees talked about the students gaining independence, self-confidence, and social adeptness irrespective of whether the students worked on a research project. Looking across the interviews, a common theme emerged. Summer experiences were perceived to be most valuable if the student had close one-on-one, conversation-filled interactions with a mentor and if the student was actively involved in thinking about how the summer project could best make a real-world difference.
Notably absent from my poster was a discussion about how undergraduate research programs are uniquely equipped to continue liberal arts education throughout the summer. To be sure, we found that the students who chose to work with faculty on research projects had some different experiences than the students who did not. We also discovered that the research students and their mentors were more likely to mention that students learned how knowledge is created—arguably, an important early step in a liberal arts education. Yet, from our interviewees’ perspectives, it was clear that staff mentors were applying elements of Chickering’s "seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education" [b] just as much as faculty mentors. What’s more, those good practices seemed to be bearing similar fruit.
Our sense, however, is that an unstated assumption still permeates many liberal arts college campuses—that faculty/student interaction, inside and outside the classroom, is the most potent means of student learning. Even the design of our study was rooted in this assumption. Initially we enrolled staff members and their students only to provide a baseline against which to measure the expected successes of the students who joined faculty mentors in research. The staff group was our "control" group. But our results told us that both interactions yielded positive benefits.
It is important to recognize the significant role that staff play in student learning. As we discovered in our interviews, staff members who devote themselves to educating students in addition to doing the jobs they were "hired to do" can feel unappreciated, and even hurt, by the lack of recognition they receive for their good efforts on our students' behalf. As we work together, we should applaud the contributions of both sets of teachers—faculty and staff. We are all better off working as a strong, united team, jointly dedicated to the college’s educational mission.
Now that we know that many of the design characteristics, interpersonal relationships, and outcomes of undergraduate research experiences are also present in non-research-focused interactions between students and their staff mentors, it is time to think broadly about how best to optimize faculty and staff members’ involvement in our students’ extracurricular learning. It is critical that we take full advantage of all of our team’s players. A quick look at the ratio of students to faculty tells us that we cannot place the burden of education solely on the shoulders of the professoriate. A second quick look at our data and that of researchers such as Ernest Pascarella [1] and George Kuh [2] tells us that we should not do so.
If we were to condense our study’s results into a two-sentence instruction manual for successfully developing problem-solving and social skills outside of the classroom, the manual for faculty mentors of research interns would be fairly obvious: (1) Spend plenty of time conversing with the student about the project. (2) Spend plenty of time conversing with the student about other topics unrelated to the project. For staff mentors, who typically each oversee more than one student, the two guidelines would be as follows: (1) Be intentional about letting each student work more independently as the internship proceeds. (2) Encourage students to talk to their peers about their projects. In our cohort, students with mentors who followed these respective guidelines were significantly more likely to learn how to troubleshoot on their own and/or to know appropriate ways of interacting with others to gain or give help.
A third and final guideline from our research is relevant to all supervisors of summer students: Regardless of the type of work, act as if the student’s experience is an internship rather than a job. Whether students worked with faculty members or staff, students who thought of their summer experience as an "internship" rather than a "job" were more likely to benefit. At first glance, distinguishing between the two might seem a game of semantics. However, the terms reflect distinct mindsets about the role of a mentor and about what a student may expect to gain from the experience. A mentor in Wabash’s Campus Services department summarized this point nicely. "This is a place of employment for many, and ultimately the institution is an institution for education. . . . I’m not here just to work and get a paycheck, I’m here to help."
Notes
Direct responses to lao@wabash.edu. We will forward comments to the author.
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