Evaluating Undergraduate Research Experiences—Development of a Self-Report Tool

Abstract

Despite many millions of dollars being spent each year to support undergraduate research experiences for students in the sciences, there has been little in the way of solid evaluation of these experiences. Recently, research has surfaced that addresses this issue and provides tools that are useful for researchers and evaluators to assess the gains students make from participation. This paper offers a new tool that can be used to measure student gains as a result of participation in these experiences. We discuss the development of the tool and use confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate the quality of the tool for measuring change over time in student confidence.

Keywords

• science education
• undergraduate research experiences
• factor analysis
• survey