Introduction

Patricia Ann Mabrouk

doi: 10.18833/spur/6/1/5

With this issue, we start a new volume in the life of SPUR. It may surprise you because I have been at the helm of SPUR for a year now, but this is my first issue because most of the content and the themes for the previous issues were birthed under founding Editor in Chief James LaPlant’s excellent leadership.

Editorials

You will see a few changes in this issue. Moving forward, each issue will include an editorial. I will use these as an opportunity to share with you my opinion and perspective as Editor in Chief of SPUR on important issues or needs directly affecting our journal and work. From time to time, I may invite experts from the Editorial Board and the undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative inquiry (URSCI) community to share their views on current events or social issues impacting us. Whatever the topic, the purpose of these short pieces will be to enlighten, inform, and challenge us all in our work as URSCI practitioners and scholars. In this inaugural editorial, I want to educate and encourage all to more conscious recognition of our scholarly work as research with human subjects and the importance of seeking an Institutional Review Board or Ethics Board review at the outset of our studies.

Communications

Second, we are experimenting with a new manuscript type called a communication, which some of you may already have encountered through your disciplinary scholarship. Communications, also frequently called reports, are short manuscripts describing a (single) new, exciting but preliminary finding resulting from an experimental study that is of broad interest and impact to the research community, in this case the undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative inquiry (URSCI) community. The timeliness of communicating this finding to the community either for raising awareness of the finding or to promote collaborations that facilitate the deeper, broader examination of the subject and finding necessary for a complete study and publication of a full article. Communications are not intended as a vehicle to circumvent the speed or rigor of the publication process for full articles. Descriptive pieces discontinued, single-shot efforts, or works failing to have the traditional earmarks of a high-quality study are inappropriate for submission as communications.

So, communications are shorter (~1500 words) reports. In terms of organization and content, they should be organized the same way as full articles. They should open with a focused introduction that clearly outlines the literature gap the work intends to fill, citing the critical, relevant peer-reviewed literature (preferably no more than ten references). Next, the research methodology and results should be described in sufficient detail for readers to judge the quality of the work. Finally, these pieces should offer specific conclusions and recommendations for the URSCI community, given the study’s limitations. A maximum of three visuals—figures (preferably 2) and tables (preferably 1)—may be used.

In This Issue

We open this issue with a contribution by Jeremy Ng (Ottowa Hospital and McMaster University) and his student coauthors Neethu Pavithran, Redwan Haque, Neha Dhanvanthry, Ankush Sharma, Arjun Singh, Chun Ju Liang, Radha Sharma, Stephanie Nagy, Harrison Nelson, Soumya Shastri, Saameh Siddique, Vedish Soni, Chitrini Tandon, Molly H. R. Cowls, Alessandra Cutrone, Ayomide Fakuade, Varnikaa Gupta, Halton Quach, and Jessica B. Saini. Their article tells the story of Undergraduate Research in Natural and Clinical Science and Technology (URNCST), a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary undergraduate research journal celebrating its fifth anniversary. URNCST holistically supports not only undergraduate student researchers but also the professional development of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research faculty mentors who serve as editorial board members and reviewers, as well as the journal’s exciting educational publishing initiatives, specifically, the Mentored Paper Initiative and the Research Methods Primer.

Mindy Capaldi, Kristi Bugajski, Bonnie Dahlke-Goebbert, Michael Watters (Valparaiso University), and Michelle Slattery (Peak Research LLC) report in their piece entitled “Improving Retention of Commuter STEM Students through Undergraduate Research” on Valparaiso’s Establishing Practices Integrating Commuter Students (EPIC) program. Established in 2016, the NSF-funded EPIC program aims to increase the retention of commuter students in STEM majors through their engagement in undergraduate research opportunities. The authors describe the program, lessons learned, and expansion plans made possible through a recent second NSF award.

In “Does It Matter If I Call It a CURE? Identity Development in Online Entrepreneurship Coursework,” Jennifer Kuan (California State University, Monterey Bay) and Quentin C. Sedlacek (Southern Methodist University) argue that non-STEM students in majors like business may not consider “doing research” relevant to their career path and examine the impact that explicitness in characterizing research activities and an instructor’s research career can have in a course-based undergraduate research experience on students’ growth and self-identification as researchers.

In Assessment, Keith Brouhle and Brad Graham (Grinnell College) investigate the impact of undergraduate research experiences across academic disciplines on students’ attainment of master’s or non-PhD graduate and PhD degrees. The impact of undergraduate research on students’ pursuit of advanced study for a non-PhD degree is an important question that has received little attention in the undergraduate research literature. The authors’ findings have important implications for designing undergraduate research experiences for students across disciplines pursuing different careers.

In “How Is What and What Is How: Research and Writing in an Integrated Biology and Literature Course,” Sandy Feinstein and Bryan S. Wang (Penn State University) report on an introductory level general education honors course, From Beast Books to Resurrecting Dinosaurs, they developed that introduces first- and second-year students to research from two different disciplinary viewpoints and challenges their perspectives on the intersection between the sciences and the humanities.

The issue closes with a book review by Anne C. Behler (Penn State University) of the second edition of Information Now: A Graphic Guide to Student Research and Web Literacy, an introductory textbook on the research process for undergraduates. The textbook and review should interest research mentors, especially those teaching introductory information literacy or first-year composition courses.

Annually, we set aside space to publicly recognize and thank our peer reviewers. We could not produce SPUR if not for the generosity of our reviewers, who lend their time, technical knowledge, and experience to evaluation of the manuscripts that we receive. On behalf of the Editorial Board, our authors, and myself, I want to express my sincere thanks to all our reviewers for your fine work!