Tracking and Assessing Undergraduate Research Campus-wide: Demographics, Academic Success, and Post-Graduation Plans

Evaluation must occur at the university level to understand the full impact of undergraduate research (UR). UR assessment is often only completed at the individual program level because of limited technology, time, and/or resources. At our large research institution, we have been documenting a wide variety of research experiences annually since the 2009–2010 academic year through an online portal. With our institutional research team and campus partners, we created interactive dashboards that display involvement in UR by semester and academic year. Here we compile data on students involved in UR compared to the university population as a whole. Consistent trends from this yearly data have shown that non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students, transfer students, and part-time students are less involved in research. However, underrepresented and first-generation involvement tends to trend consistently with the university population, likely because of a wide variety of focused programming. Despite many interventions aimed at engaging students in their first three years, data show that researchers remain mostly seniors. Students are also tracked to graduation and beyond, providing a unique evaluation of UR. Grade point averages and graduation rates tend to be higher for student researchers. Time to degree is similar between researchers and nonresearchers. Students are tracked into graduate school as well and on average have an almost 50% increase in matriculation compared to nonresearchers. There are still gaps in this university-level knowledge, but this portal helps clarify campus-wide involvement and opportunities for enhancement, while serving as a comparison data set and a model system for other universities.