large public research-extensive universities such as Texas A&M University have two primary missions: increase access to education (typically with didactic classes) and perform research (typically in small laboratories) (35). To help universities fulfill these divergent missions, the National Science Foundation (NSF), in particular, has encouraged the integration of research and education. First, all research grants are now required to include “broader impacts” that include components such as “advancing discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning” or “broadening the participation of underrepresented groups” (9). Second, the NSF invests over $50 million for 4,500 students to attend research experience for undergraduates sites, primarily to promote careers in research (14). Despite the sustained efforts of federal funding institutions, the Boyer Commission (4) criticized research-extensive universities for not providing “maximal opportunities for intellectual and creative development” by “[learning] through inquiry rather than transmission of knowledge.” This commission suggested making inquiry-based learning the standard, providing a mentor for every student, removing barriers to interdisciplinary education, providing research opportunities for first-year students, enhancing oral and written communication, and educating graduate students as apprentice teachers. However, the Boyer Commission did not propose any means to achieve these self-described “controversial goals” other than to suggest “radically reconstructing” the culture of the university.

Aside from didactic courses covering the theory of research, research training in research-extensive universities is based on an apprenticeship model (7), where students learn by working closely with experienced researchers. Studies of both students and faculty have identified a number of requirements for successful one-on-one research mentoring. First, students collaborate with the faculty to design their own projects. This ensures student participation in all aspects of the project, providing a sense of “ownership” as well as providing exposure to higher-level scientific thought (22). Second, students have opportunities to explore their ingenuity and creativity and thus have some control over the direction of their activities (30). Third, mentors spend significant time providing not only scientific expertise but also emotional and social support (28). Finally, students receive technical training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and equipment (16). Taken together, ideal one-on-one mentoring is both time and resource intensive.

Successfully sustaining a research program in a research-extensive university has twin requirements: continuity in funding and continuity in expertise (4). A research proposal often needs more than just a novel and important scientific idea; there must also be preliminary data to successfully secure competitive grant funding (18). Once a grant is obtained, the primary investigator has the difficult task of completing the specific aims within a few years. Given the need to submit continuing proposals as much as a year before the proposed award date, this further compresses the time available to produce a record of publication and gather preliminary data. This unforgiving timeline requires the labor of technicians, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students with the specific skills necessary to accomplish the grant's aims. On one hand, failure to maintain a pool of skilled labor can endanger continued funding. On the other hand, failure to secure continued funding can result in loss of skilled labor. A break in either continuity of funding or of expertise thus leads to a vicious cycle and premature termination of a research program. Not only is restarting a research program after a funding hiatus hampered by a lack of resources but senior faculty members are often required to increase their university service or teaching load and junior faculty members may simply fail to get tenure (25). With such high stakes, it is not surprising that faculty members have concerns that mentoring undergraduates entails an extensive time commitment and threatens their productivity (14).

Undergraduate students need to earn a respectable grade point average (GPA), learn to work and think independently, and choose a career path before graduation. Graduate students, on the other hand, need to publish in the scientific literature, prepare for a career involving collaboration and project management, and complete dissertation research in a reasonable span of time. For promotion and tenure, faculty must recruit skilled labor, maximize research productivity, ensure funding continuity, and perform the minimum required teaching. These conflicting goals manifest as notable limitations of the one-on-one research apprenticeship model. First, given the competition for limited research positions, senior undergraduates with high GPAs are often given preference (27). Such selection can have a disparate impact on underrepresented groups and miss a critical window in the first 2 yr to motivate students to pursue research careers (6, 33) and enhance retention in science majors (26, 28). Although one-on-one research experiences can be highly effective (19), students have been known to assist graduate students by performing low-level scientific tasks or “intellectual bottlewashing” (27). Even NSF-funded research experiences for undergraduates sites change the intention of only 3% of their participants to apply to graduate schools (34), possibly reflecting the tendency to “select the winners” (14). Without a pool of skilled undergraduates to choose from, faculty members resort to indirect academic indicators such as GPA and graduate records examination scores (8) to evaluate research potential of graduate school applicants. More importantly, faculty members must allocate their limited time to train new graduate students. The cost can only be recovered by keeping trained graduate students for as long as possible. Given the need to ensure funding continuity, graduate students are given few opportunities to form collaborations and manage a research program (13). Finally, since faculty members perceive they are not rewarded for teaching (4), they have few incentives to provide training opportunities for undergraduates, thus contributing to the shortage of skilled labor. The proportion of matriculated students that can be offered research positions, however, has historically been small, even in large research-extensive universities with very effective institutionalized programs (38).

Despite the difficulty in evaluating educational outcomes for research programs (23, 24), research mentoring programs based on the one-on-one apprenticeship model have been shown to be highly effective (19) and can be aligned with ongoing faculty research to provide excellent, high-level research opportunities for undergraduates. Nevertheless, the Boyer Commission did not mince words: “Research universities have often failed, and continue to fail their undergraduate populations; thousands of students graduate without seeing the world-famous professors or tasting genuine research” (4). The underlying reasons for the inability of institutionalized programs to offer research opportunities to all undergraduates in public research-extensive universities are easily identified. First, there are simply too few faculty members to provide one-on-one mentoring to every undergraduate in a large public university. Second, the time commitment to support one-on-one mentoring for more than a few students is incompatible with the requirements of sustaining an active research program. As a result, the needs of the institution, laboratory directors, graduate students, and undergraduates are not being met because they do not share the same goals. The present work therefore describes the development and implementation of a “research-intensive community” model at Texas A&M University that radically increases the number of undergraduate opportunities while also aligning the divergent goals of stakeholders at multiple levels of a research and education institution.

MODEL DEVELOPMENT AND ANALYSIS

Model Development

The setting.

In the summer of 2003, C. M. Quick, with the support from the Michael E. DeBakey Institute (directed by G. A. Laine), reintroduced the Pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus) as a model for microvascular research. The anatomy of the Pallid bat wing makes it possible to study blood vessels noninvasively via intravital microscopy, thus eliminating the need for terminal experiments (36, 37). Since these animals can be repeatedly studied without harm, they can support a large number of experiments. The original purpose for investing a sizable portion of startup funds in establishing a chronic colony was to test mathematical models of acute and chronic vascular network adaptation (31). Although live animal research has the potential for increasing student interest in physiology (17), the cost and institutional imperatives to reduce animal use (2, 32) make research projects involving animals particularly rare for undergraduates.

Inception of a research-intensive community at Texas A&M University.

By the fall of 2003, despite extensive investment in state-of-the-art microscopy equipment, graduate students skilled in intravital microscopy could not be recruited. Out of a sense of urgency, C. M. Quick (i.e., the laboratory director) invited 20 undergraduate and graduate students with at least 3.0 GPA to work in his laboratory in Summer 2004. Due to insufficient management experience, the laboratory director created four teams based on his own undergraduate training in engineering. However, unlike conventional undergraduate engineering teams (11), students invited to the laboratory were in different stages of training and were studying disciplines as diverse as biomedical sciences, veterinary medicine, and biomedical engineering. Therefore, each team was made explicitly interdisciplinary and included graduate students. Because it was difficult to create four distinct, well-defined, low-risk projects de novo, each team was charged to develop its own project based on personal interest. Even with the participation of R. H. Stewart, the ability to provide direct mentoring was limited. Given the freedom to explore and improvise, the teams quickly asserted themselves by redefining problems when equipment or lack of expertise became a barrier to progress. Although no leaders were assigned, as the summer progressed the teams became increasingly independent, with more-experienced graduate students mentoring undergraduates. Furthermore, because all teams were located in the same laboratory space, they began interacting to address common conceptual and experimental challenges. A self-organizing, cooperative, multilevel community thus arose with distributed decision making, and S. N. Gatson was invited to observe the developing group and advise the laboratory director on further development of the emerging model.

Fall 2004.

To mimic team structures that arose organically, eight teams were organized, each with one graduate student “team leader” mentoring three undergraduate students. Undergraduates were no longer excluded on the basis of GPA, since it became clear to the laboratory director that some students with lower GPAs outperformed students with higher GPAs and students with the highest GPAs did not perform as well as expected. Because teams conducted experiments at different times that accommodated their class schedules, a prototype web-based tool was refined to efficiently facilitate communication between teams, track team activities, and document their actions. Research processes such as reviewing the literature, presenting scientific ideas, and writing conference abstracts, however, required individual attention and a considerable investment of faculty time.

Spring 2005.

The majority of students who participated in the fall returned to seed 10 new teams, and the laboratory director became a “program director.” Weekly workshops were incorporated to enrich interaction among teams and to allow the program director to disseminate information common to all projects. The practice of weekly “Journal Club” was introduced to ensure that teams became familiar with scientific articles pertaining to their projects. The program director perceived that the performance of veteran first- and second-year undergraduates was better than fourth-year undergraduates who were new to the community. Furthermore, a large number of students graduated at the end of the semester. It thus became clear to the laboratory director that there was a benefit to recruiting first- and second-year students who had the potential to retain corporate knowledge of laboratory practices for multiple semesters.

Fall 2005.

With the participation of new graduate students seeking management experience, 12 teams were created. To prepare new leaders to efficiently manage their teams and to share discovered best practices amongst veteran leaders, a “Graduate Leadership Forum” was created. Some veteran graduate students, who recognized the potential to expand the scope of their research, requested a second or even third team to manage. Some veteran undergraduate students (with more experience than some new graduate students) also became team leaders.

Spring 2006.

With the participation of faculty members from other departments who wanted to be part of the rapidly evolving research community, 20 teams were formed. Subsequently, a “Faculty Leadership Forum” was initiated to discuss programmatic issues such as the management of research teams and writing grants. The resulting components of the research-intensive community program are shown in Fig. 1.

Model Analysis

To characterize program efficiency, faculty-to-student ratios were calculated (as means + SD) from published reports of representative undergraduate research programs at peer research-extensive universities (35) and compared with the ratios collected over the last 3 yr for the research-intensive community program at Texas A&M University. Furthermore, a survey was taken of the team leaders (n = 10) to compare the time spent mentoring a single team to the time spent mentoring multiple teams. To provide evidence of research productivity of our program, the total number of peer-reviewed abstracts accepted to physiology or bioengineering conferences from Fall 2004 to Fall 2006 was compiled.

To characterize program growth, the number of undergraduate, graduate, and faculty participants per semester was tabulated. Team leaders were surveyed to determine whether they were willing to recommit to leading teams another semester.

To characterize the goals of the participants within the research-intensive community, structured interviews with team leaders (n = 10) and undergraduate students (n = 10) were conducted in Fall 2007. Consistent with educational psychology (3), personal goals were grouped as being an individual's self-interest or a collective interest in community as well as their relation to the program's educational or research practices. This reflects how individuals in groups develop and align proximal subgoals from more distal goals, which are often expressed vernacularly as interests.

RESULTS

Institutionalized undergraduate research programs at three universities identified as peer institutions (35) (University of California-Los Angeles, University of Wisconsin, and University of Michigan) had a faculty-to-student ratio of 1:1.8 + 1.3 per semester. In contrast, the research-intensive community program at Texas A&M University had a faculty-to-student ratio that varied between 1:15 and 1:25. Team leaders estimated that mentoring a team of three students required 13 + 5 h/wk; mentoring an additional team did not increase this time.

Figure 2 demonstrates the growth of undergraduate participation from Summer 2004 to Spring 2006. Table 1 shows the numbers of undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members participating in the research-intensive community each semester. Ninety percent of team leaders expressed a desire to return to the program as a mentor for a second semester. Faculty members new to the community could mentor far fewer than the optimal number of students by leveraging the infrastructure of the established research-intensive community.

Interviews of the undergraduate students indicated that their goals (Table 2) were primarily characterized by individual self-interests. The research-intensive community program helped them gain an authentic research experience, enhance academic credentials, make career-related decisions, establish relationships with research professionals, and increase familiarity with particular subjects while developing a capacity for critical problem solving.

Interviews of the graduate students (Table 3) revealed that participation in the research-intensive community program played a significant role in publishing conference abstracts and manuscripts, developing leadership skills to manage diverse teams, and conducting novel research to broaden experience and improve their curriculum vitae. Unlike undergraduates, graduate students also expressed collective interests as a result of their participation in the research-intensive community program. Identified collective interests included mentoring undergraduates to acquire research skills, helping the program director with acquiring tenure and funding, and exploring unanswered questions in science as well as conducting research to improve the lives of others.

Through his participation in the research-intensive community program, the program director provided graduate students with research and management training. Furthermore, he was able to identify and recruit new graduate students from a pool of particularly skilled undergraduates based on a known history of research performance. The research-intensive community model generated 113 conference-related publications from Fall 2004 to Fall 2006 with undergraduate students as first authors or co-authors.

DISCUSSION

The Research-Intensive Community as a Learning Curriculum

In their ethnographic study of communities of practice, Lave and Wenger (20) characterize learning curricula as those that allow individuals to “improvise” ways of authentically relating the core knowledge of a community to their own goals for participation. Two social conditions are required for inquiry activities to be authentic to members of the community. First, all members must occupy empowered positions. In the research-intensive community at Texas A&M University, veterans and novices negotiate the roles, norms, and meanings of doing research. Participants select projects, determine the manner of their participation, and even disinvest from projects that no longer satisfy their goals. Second, members achieve self-efficacy through the communicative practices of the community. In the research-intensive community program, online tools, weekly workshops, journal clubs, and forums emerged as sites where the competency of each members' performance could be judged by others. Beyond demonstrating research productivity, the research-intensive community model captures the essential characteristics for authentic activities within a learning community.

The Research-Intensive Community as a Complex Adaptive System

The research-intensive community model exhibits a number of characteristics that make it a complex adaptive system; it consists of diverse interconnected agents that interact and respond to their local environments (1, 21), not unlike vascular networks studied by the program director (31). The fundamental organizational unit of the research-intensive community is the team, consisting of a broadly diverse group of three undergraduates led by a team leader. As with any complex adaptive system, control is highly decentralized (21). Charged with formulating projects, designing novel experimental techniques, and solving problems that arise in the course of the project, teams exercised a high degree of autonomy. Like other complex adaptive systems that tend to evolve, the research-intensive community program at Texas A&M University exhibited emergent properties arising from the cooperation and interaction of participants. Teams began coordinating their activities through specialized online tools, weekly workshops, journal clubs and other team meetings, and forums. In fact, it is the fundamental nature of the model as a complex adaptive system that allowed it to evolve since its inception in the summer of 2004, changing and learning from experience gained from competing best practices that were developed by each team. In general, complex adaptive systems tend to be resilient, fill new niches, and reproduce (10). The research-intensive community model as implemented at Texas A&M University exhibited each of these qualities, giving us good reason to believe that the program is transferable to other universities. Of course, all complex adaptive systems require an input of energy for emergent properties to manifest (5). In the case of the research-intensive community, many of the new programmatic elements and management tools were designed specifically to reduce the administrative input of the laboratory director and team leaders. The additional time required to administer the research-intensive community program was offset by course credit for graduate students and teaching credit for the laboratory director.

eBat as an Example of a New Tool to Support Research-Intensive Communities

The development of the large-scale research-intensive community program at Texas A&M University required new tools designed specifically to 1) maximize the efficiency of program management, 2) enhance communication and community formation, and 3) integrate research and educational activities. Our particular solution was to develop an online communication portal called “eBat” (29). Beyond traditional e-mail, members used eBat to create and maintain a central online presence in the deliberative activities of the community. The synchronous and asynchronous functions of eBat's virtual workspace allows participants to 1) participate in one or more discussions; 2) contribute, even if they are not physically present in the laboratory; and 3) develop a sense of personal legitimacy in the community's deliberative practices. Space is dedicated for informal daily reports of experimental findings, difficulties, and questions; formal weekly updates; and any “discoveries,” whether or not verified as a novel finding by detailed literature review. Ideas that are recognized as novel and scientifically important enough to warrant development of peer-reviewed publication are transferred to the “manuscript builder.” This particular tool allows uploading of abstracts, outlines, rough drafts, final drafts, and page proofs of manuscripts in development. Not only can new community members learn how published manuscripts evolve but they are provided guidance for constructively criticizing manuscripts in preparation. With integrated forms for applying to the program, reporting problems, and evaluating performance of undergraduate students, the online portal reduces time spent on administrative activities. Taken together, these tools are manifestations of governing principles of openness [e.g., making “thinking visible” (7, 12) for neophytes and education researchers], authenticity (e.g., avoiding educational activities that do not enhance research productivity), and synergy (i.e., ensuring activities serve both research and education).

Changing the Way We Institutionalize Programs

The Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR) is an example of a nonprofit organization that complements the NSF's attempts to establish, formalize, and expand undergraduate research opportunities. According to CUR (15), institutionalizing a research program involves creating 1) a sustainable undergraduate research program based on best practices, 2) a community of faculty members and administrators that share a mutual interest in undergraduate research, and 3) a culture that supports undergraduate research. Several well-funded universities such as the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have successfully institutionalized undergraduate research programs (27), primarily by leveraging existing research opportunities. The low faculty-to-student ratios in research programs at most large public universities (27), however, can limit opportunities for one-on-one research mentoring. The research-intensive community program at Texas A&M University, however, provides a novel means to radically increase the number of undergraduates that can be supported by a single faculty member and is inherently scalable. In addition, it has three critical aspects that do not require formal institutionalization. First, because it is distributed, yet has internal mechanisms to share ideas recognized to have value, a sustainable organization based on best practices emerges. Second, because educational activities have the potential to produce fundable research, it can form a community of faculty members and administrators that share a mutual interest in undergraduate research. Finally, because the model aligns the goals of undergraduates with graduate students and faculty members, it yields an environment that supports undergraduate research without requiring a radical change in university culture (4). The research-intensive community model thus may provide the means to fulfill the promise of public research-extensive universities: providing educational opportunities for all (13).

GRANTS

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grants EEC-0502212, DBI-0552902, and EEC-0609395 and by National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Grant 1-R25-HL-084667.