My students are not pursuing a final year thesis but I would like to expose them to research and even start them off on publishing their papers. What do you do/ what ideas can you suggest to do this is an enjoyable and accessible way?
It is a bad idea in itself that the curriculum do NOT have a research project. Try to include in the curriculum ASAP. Alternatively, short projects, summer projects, extra projects where you let students to use the lab where possible. The students should try to spend more time with the supervisor, learn from what the supervisor has learnt so far, read his/her papers, repeat those experiments where possible, do reviews in the field that is of interest to the supervisor.
In Engineering, our fourth year students have to do some practical research, and write about it in a final year report. The standard of research and reporting on it must be high, but is not archived or even published, just marked and externally examined. This serves as a hook to get some to stay on to do their Masters.
In addition, their oral presentations are an opportunity to get them to speak in public (an important skill!) and to gain some publicity for the activities of the university. They are paired of in groups of two to help the process along. The oral also serves to ensure that both partners contributed.
The students struggle to understand how to read research, do research and write research, and so a lot of time is allocated to this in this capstone course.
The enjoyment is in making some thing new (process, algorithm, program, prototype, model...) and in getting it to work (for at least as long as the open day lasts!). You do need to provide access to facilities and materials to make it possible. You should use your personal links to factories etc. to make their contributions meaningful.
I have published about one in fifty undergraduate reports eventually as joint papers.
Thank you for your comments, Dr. Kangueane and Dr. Kennedy. I asked my question because I have some second year students not involved in any large projects and wanted to build into my course opportunities to enhance their research and publication skills if possible. 1 in 50 reports eventually finding their way to publication is an interesting statistic. It would be interesting to learn about the statistics from programme to programme and from university to university.
Basically, you simply take the best paper and try to get it into shape for publication.
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