Research Apprenticeship Program
December 2021 - May 2022

During my sophomore year on campus, I decided to apply for the Undergraduate Research Center’s Research Apprenticeship Program (RAP) upon recommendation from one of my professors. RAP is a program where undergraduate students interested in research are partnered with a professor who teaches them the research process, and together the professor and student put together a research project. I ended up being partnered with a professor who was not in my major or minors. However, that did not matter to me because she had a very interesting topic for her research project. Our project’s topic was how class format changes student motivation in undergraduate students. The project began with me doing some background research on the topic and reading multiple academic articles that fit with the research topic. After reading and summarizing these articles, the professor looked over my work and told me that I did a good job summarizing and choosing articles for the project. After that, I put together a bibliography for the sources that I found as well as the other sources that she had me read prior to finding my own.

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Once the bibliography was put together, I looked at the survey she had written to give out to her students and gave her some feedback on the questions that were a bit confusing to me to hopefully correct them before the survey reached the students. I also learned about the process of getting your research cleared when you have human subjects. My professor and I met once a week. During the meeting, she instructed me on what my tasks were for each week. I would do the tasks. If I had any questions, I would reach out to her and ask them, or I could wait until our next meeting to ask them. This format allowed me to learn on my own, yet I had a person who had the experience I was lacking to consult. After the survey results came in, I learned how to use the software SPSS, a data analyzing and graphing software on the computer, to analyze the data from the survey. We were trying to see if self-reported student motivation correlated with test scores and proficiency in the course. Once my professor walked me through how to build the correct graphs, I wrote each section of the poster and put everything on a poster template provided to me by my professor. She checked over my work a few more times before I submitted my poster that was available for viewing in the Undergraduate Research Center’s online fall 2022 symposium.

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Through this experience I have learned the different steps to research and how to go about each step. The beginning of the research was dedicated to finding the different databases and finding the right terms to search in each database. There were two main databases I used to find articles: Mavscholar and google scholar. As far as search terms went, I picked out the main words of our topic such as class format and student motivation. These terms were helpful when narrowing down articles to use. When I read every article, I thought might pertain to the topic, I tried to narrow down which articles to use by focusing on studies that relied on students who were close to the undergraduate age or those that were very specifically comparing the two class formats that we were focusing on for the experiment. It was helpful to have the professor there alongside me so that if I did have any questions, someone was there to help me work through them. Something that went well is that I truly feel like I have a grasp of the research process. However, I know that the program was a little bit of a fast-paced environment, and in most other research project types one would do more background research. Eventually one would write a paper instead of just creating a poster. My poster did include elements that would show up in a final paper, but it is far less detailed than an academic article or paper would be due to the size and length constraints. Also, through researching the proper sequence of going about research with human subjects, I learned a different side to research that I had never been exposed to before. There are many more ethical dilemmas involved in this type of research than in the previous research projects that I have done. Most of the research projects that I have done were not new and had been tested many different times so almost all of the error was human error. However, in this research project I was working with actual human subjects who self-reported their grades and student motivation. The nature of self-reporting introduces many sources of error that I had not seen before. This experience also taught me that if you do not know something, it is best to ask. Someone out there knows the answer or the best way to find it, so if you ask, you can get some help instead of struggling.

 

 

Now I am left to figure out how I will continue on with research while here at MSU. I plan to use the process that I learned and the various little aspects I learned and use them in my research projects inside of my classes. In fact, I used SPSS in one of my classes the other day because I was unsure if the program that my professor was using was correct. It felt great knowing that I had the knowledge of another program to just jump in and check the results. It was through SPSS that I was able to make the necessary graph and correct some of the mistakes that were made in the other program. Through this experience I learned that research is not something to take lightly; as such, I will not just jump into a research project as that could harm my grades in school and my life outside of school. I will properly plan around my next research project and prepare myself for the work and commitment it takes to successfully complete a research project.

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