Sometimes I work directly with undergraduates, but more often they work directly with my doctoral students. The undergrads sometimes work on our projects as research assistants, and sometimes we supervise their honor's thesis or other projects that are theirs. At first they do fairly low level tasks, like data collection or coding. As time goes on they are trained to do more and more complex tasks until they are capable of doing all steps of a project. Of course, with a thesis they do everything under supervision.

Gregory, this is an important question as it echoes the need for more experienced researchers and tutors to start developing a pipeline of research talent earlier on in the education process. The undergraduate level of study is a reasonable point to start engaging students in this process. This should entail starting with helping students to learn how to formulate an interesting topic for research, teaching them how to develop and refine research questions, aims and objectives. The data collection process should encourage students to operationalise various research methods tools ranging from quantitative to qualitative and mixed methods. The presentation of results and their analysis should encourage students not just to examine how various analytical frameworks have been put together and used in other studies, with the help of showing them a few papers, but also what the potential implications of doing so are. In this way, students learn research as part of a holistic process of investigating, reporting, evaluating, discussing and drawing valid conclusions. Interesting...

I think a lot of instruction in this area over emphasizes 'rigour' in research at the cost of 'relevance'. I spend significant amount of time building up student researcher skills through the application of theory to practice - as in why does it matter? It helps to get students out of their "heads" when they are intimidated by theory and get them to discuss what it might mean for them and their journey.

I also find that students feel they need to read everything first before writing rather than use the act of writing as a mean to think through the relevance of theory.

I highly recommend Rowena Murray's book on How to Write a Thesis - Chap 1 introduces simple free writing exercises. One student have written something in say 30 mins - it's useful to discuss it.

We have a new concept on this scope of this nice question.. we called it Youthineering

Book YOUTHINEERING New Perspectives On Youth Economy

Students need to inspired by getting them engaged first with the Professor live projects and then giving them a challenge or a real life problem in the community. However, the evaluation system need to support this. i.e. Examination would carry a weight of less than 40%. And 60% should be go to field projects.

Here is one of the papers we published on the subject and in different countries

Article In Search of the Inspired Student—Measuring of Youth Inspira...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342903395_Exploring_Students_Projects_Competitions

Hi Gregory,

Interesting question, and something I've been trying to introduce for the last 5 years or so in our undergraduate Design programs. My approach to introducing research is 'early, little, and often' across the 3-4 years of undergrad study, scaffolding up understanding from year one.

Developing this 'research culture' in year 1 is important. It's primarilary qual-based research in Design, so, for example, in year 1 I introduce them to the basics of listening observing, and interviewing participants along with ethical considerations. We invite end-users into the studio to develop an understanding of real-world issues. We develop the complexity as years go on, but it's very much small steps and ensuring that the research is put into practice and implemented directly into the assessment.

So far it's working by the time students get to year 4 it's an integral part of their project work. If you have any questions Id be happy to elaborate

Hope this helps

P.J.

Write from first year you encourage them to be on the look out of any research problem in your field. You tell them to research on the solution by looking at the literature. this makes them ready for research work towards the end of their course.