2020/03/17 by Lior Shamir, Shamir, Lior
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Mathematics · #FOS: Physical sciences #Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research #Online Learning and Analytics #Physics Education (physics.ed-ph) #Statistics Education and Methodologies #Teaching and Learning Programming
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.10821
openalex publication_date 2020/03/17 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Research experience and mentoring has been identified as an effective\nintervention for increasing student engagement and retention in the STEM\nfields, with high impact on students from undeserved populations. However,\none-on-one mentoring is limited by the number of available faculty, and in\ncertain cases also by the availability of funding for stipend. One-on-one\nmentoring is further limited by the selection and self-selection of students.\nSince research positions are often competitive, they are often taken by the\nbest-performing students. More importantly, many students who do not see\nthemselves as the top students of their class, or do not identify themselves as\nresearchers might not apply, and that self selection can have the highest\nimpact on non-traditional students. To address the obstacles of scalability,\nselection, and self-selection, we designed a data science research experience\nfor undergraduates as part of an introductory computer science course. Through\nthe intervention, the students are exposed to authentic research as early as\ntheir first semester. The intervention is inclusive in the sense that all\nstudents registered to the course participate in the research, with no process\nof selection or self-selection. The research is focused on analytics of large\ntext databases. Using discovery-enabling software tools, the students analyze a\ncorpus of congressional speeches, and identify patterns of differences between\ndemocratic speeches and republican speeches, differences between speeches for\nand against certain bills, and differences between speeches about bills that\npassed and bills that did not pass. In the beginning of the research experience\nall student follow the same protocol and use the same data, and then each group\nof students work on their own research project as part of their final project\nof the course.\n