Integrating research and education at research-extensive universities with research-intensive communities. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Although the Boyer Commission (1998) lamented the lack of research opportunities for all undergraduates at research-extensive universities, it did not provide a feasible solution consistent with the mandate for faculty to maintain sustainable physiology research programs. The costs associated with one-on-one mentoring, and the lack of a sufficient number of faculty members to give intensive attention to undergraduate researchers, make one-on-one mentoring impractical. We therefore developed and implemented the "research-intensive community" model with the aim of aligning diverse goals of participants while simultaneously optimizing research productivity. The fundamental organizational unit is a team consisting of one graduate student and three undergraduates from different majors, supervised by a faculty member. Undergraduate workshops, Graduate Leadership Forums, and computer-mediated communication provide an infrastructure to optimize programmatic efficiency and sustain a multilevel, interdisciplinary community of scholars dedicated to research. While the model radically increases the number of undergraduates that can be supported by a single faculty member, the inherent resilience and scalability of the resulting complex adaptive system enables a research-intensive community program to evolve and grow.

published proceedings

  • Adv Physiol Educ

altmetric score

  • 8.04

author list (cited authors)

  • Desai, K. V., Gatson, S. N., Stiles, T. W., Stewart, R. H., Laine, G. A., & Quick, C. M.

citation count

  • 55

complete list of authors

  • Desai, Ketaki V||Gatson, Sarah N||Stiles, Thomas W||Stewart, Randolph H||Laine, Glen A||Quick, Christopher M

publication date

  • June 2008