Effectiveness of social science research opportunities: a study of course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs)

ABSTRACT

Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) can improve student skills, retention, and matriculation to postgraduate study. Traditionally, UREs are available mostly in the natural and biological sciences, which have fewer minority and women majors and thus have disproportionately excluded these groups from such experiences. One effective solution is to diversify and increase course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) within the social sciences. Models are few and research is limited on the impacts of parallel social science research experiences, but both are crucial to the goals of diversifying postgraduate success. Using a survey, we retrospectively assessed, qualitatively and quantitatively, past students’ (n = 87) career and personal learning impacts and outcomes in social science CUREs. These courses led to perceived improvements in understanding research processes and ethics, self-confidence, perseverance, and collaboration. Comparing to data from natural sciences, overall impacts were similar, including the intention to complete postgraduate education among first-generation students.

KEYWORDS:

• Experiential learning
• experiential education
• undergraduate research
• CURES
• first-generation students
• post-graduate education
• anthropology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Throughout this manuscript, we use the term ‘science’ to include social science as well as all enterprises “whose goal is to acquire objective knowledge” about the world and “to use that knowledge to meet human needs” (Alice and Kolb 2012, 20798; see also Bernard and Killworth 1997).

2 We use the term ‘Latinx’ to refer to people of any gender who identify as part of the Latinidad (Vidal-Ortiz and Martínez 2018).