“Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.”

— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Many undergraduates use research internships to gain experience for graduate school. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs involve heavy research and lab work duties, for which students are often unprepared and lack opportunities for practice. Evidence supports Undergraduate Research Experience (URE) programs’ ability to improve retention in STEM, but research has not conclusively identified what students need to do to excel in these programs. This analysis used a multimethod approach to identify and quantify student-to-student peer advice from six cohorts of a summer STEM URE. We identified six themes in the advice from exit surveys: proactively manage time, communicate with your team, motivate yourself, be diligent, have fun, and accommodate changes in lifestyle. Each theme included between three and five subthemes that demonstrated nuance within the larger themes. Navigating the expectations of a URE is a complicated endeavor, but participants who are close to the experience provide rich descriptions to aid adjustment. Developing strategies for time management and team communication are most important, followed by motivation, work ethic, enjoyment, and practical adjustments.

Learning Assistant (LA) programs oversee and support undergraduate instructors and faculty members who work together to facilitate student learning in a variety of classroom settings. The success of an LA program is tied to experiences of the participants; therefore, understanding the perceptions of LAs and faculty is central to driving programmatic changes and ensuring positive outcomes. In this article, we use a mixed-methods approach to analyze the perspectives of LAs and faculty in Boston University’s LA program. Using surveys and one-on-one interviews, we highlight the qualities of a strong LA, the nature of LA-faculty relationships, the role of the LA in a course, and how faculty benefit from working with LAs. Our data suggest that interpersonal skills are imperative to be a successful LA, there is variation in how LAs and faculty interact, curriculum can be inclusive of LAs, and LA-faculty partnerships impact faculty understanding and implementation of evidence-based pedagogy. This article provides targeted, actionable suggestions for LA program improvements based on our analysis, as well as a foundation for future studies to further explore the impact of the LA model on faculty and LAs.

Visual elements such as graphs, tables, and diagrams are essential components of scientific writing. Although scientific writing textbooks and guides often contain information on how to design such visuals, little has been written on how to effectively discuss those visuals within the text. This article offers a novel heuristic for teaching students how to effectively execute these “passages about visuals” in a way that is both conceptually simple enough to be understood by novices yet rich enough to accommodate the complexity of expert scientific writing. The heuristic consists of a set of “moves”: announce, orient, observe, and explain. Following an explanation of the moves, readers are walked through a variety of examples showing the moves in context and noting the different ways the moves are arranged and executed in published scientific research articles. Pedagogical implications and approaches for using the heuristic in the classroom are then discussed.

The ability to read, understand, and interpret primary scientific literature is an essential skill for undergraduate students in science. This study aimed to provide a detailed understanding of how second- and third-year undergraduate students in a biochemistry and molecular biology major at the University of Melbourne in Australia feel about reading research articles and how often they are expected to do so. Teachers’ expectations of the students’ use of literature in their assessment tasks were compared with the experiences of students with their reading of the literature. There was a clear increase in the confidence and reported skills of third-year students, as well as an increase in the importance they see in reading the literature, compared with the second-year students. This increase was matched by much higher teacher expectations that students would read the literature for their assessment tasks. This expectation can be seen in the shift from a low proportion of relatively low-level literature “understand” interactions on Bloom’s revised taxonomy to a larger proportion of marks for higher-level “analyze.” A more guided approach with second-year students would be beneficial.

Despite more women and underrepresented students entering engineering, there are still gaps in achievement. A potential remedy is to establish equitable team dynamics during groupwork. Groupware systems have been implemented in the workforce and, recently, piloted in undergraduate lower-division education to establish team norms. Our prior work found that there was a significant association between gender and the utility of rules systems to establish team norms. To assess biases regarding gender and minority groups in the rules system, we examined the differences between rules chosen by individuals and teams based on demographic characteristics in a large engineering course. Students individually identified which rules were most important when working in a team, then formed teams and performed a “negotiation” to choose which rules the team would follow. We used statistical analyses to determine whether certain demographic factors predicted how influential an individual was during the selection process. We found that demographic and educational characteristics did not have a significant influence on decision-making for team rules. Furthermore, we found that female and first-generation students were more likely to select the rule “Play an active part in the team” than their male or continuing-generation peers.