Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Attending To Scientific Practices Within Undergraduate Research Experiences, Gina Quan, Chandra Turpen, Andrew Elby

Faculty Publications

Ford (2015) argues for viewing “scientific practice” not as a list of particular skills, but rather, more holistically as “sets of regularities of behaviors and social interactions” among scientists. This conceptualization of scientific practices foregrounds how they meaningfully connect to one another and are purposefully employed in order to explain nature. We apply this framework in the context of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) to understand the early forms of student engagement in scientific practices, and how these specific forms of engagement may be consequential for students’ future participation. Using video from interviews with students and research mentors, we argue that …