A Theme-Based Seminar on Environmental Sustainability Improves Participant Satisfaction in an Undergraduate Summer Research Program

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2008 by Grimberg, Stefan J, Langen, Tom A, Compeau, Larry D, Powers, Susan E

A high proportion of Clarkson REU Site Program participants have eventually attended graduate school in science, engineering, education, or other professional careers such as medicine or law (1998-2000, 63 percent; 2002-2004, 64 percent). We cannot compare fairly recent graduate program attendance rates of the first three-year program period to the second because some participants defer several years before enrolling, thus the first three-year period is advantaged over the second simply because they have had a longer period in which to enroll.

V. DISCUSSION

Satisfaction with the Clarkson REU Program in Environmental Science and Engineering has been consistently high for participants during each year of the program. However, our assessment data indicated that participant satisfaction in the program increased in the period (2002-2005) over the first (1998-2000). This increase was not due to perceived improvements in mentoring or project success. Although it is possible that the increase in student satisfaction that occurred after instituting the weekly seminar series was merely due to increased interactions among the program participants, we think this reason is unlikely, the extra 2.5 hours per week the participants were together during the seminar was small compared to opportunities to interact while living together in adjacent apartments, during weekly social sports events, and during field trips organized by the program directors. Instead, it appears to have been due to an increase in the value that participants place on research on environmental sustainability, which emerged during the program experience as a direct consequence of the sustainability seminar. Participants indicated that the sustainability seminar was helpful (in decreasing order of magnitude) at increasing general knowledge about science and engineering, understanding how to conduct research, and at decisions related to graduate school and career. They also agreed (mean score 6.3 on a scale 0 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree) that they came to understand how their particular research project contributed to environmental sustainability (Langen and Grimberg, 2006). We conclude that a weekly seminar program that reinforces a summer research program's theme can make an important contribution to a program's success, by helping participant's appreciate the relevance of their particular research project to a broader program theme and to understand why the theme is important. Similar conclusions about the usefulness of weekly seminars in summer research programs are reported in Lax and Van Epps (2005), and Shachter (2003).

Participant satisfaction with the Clarkson REU Site Program was associated with participants'judgment of the quality of faculty mentoring, success of the program at meeting stated outcomes, perception that the program was fun, and, during the second period, how highly they valued environmental sustainability. These results are consistent with other findings and recommendations about undergraduate research experiences (Gonzalez-Espada and LaDue, 2006; Lopatto, 2003; Mabrouk and Peters, 2003; Shellito, Shea, Weissmann, Mueller-Solgar, and Davis, 2001; Sutterer, Brenny, Pirnia, Woodward, Houghtalen, and Hanson, 2005). There was a small decline between participants' expected satisfaction in the program (measured on the first program day) and their retrospective evaluation (measured on the final program day), which was nevertheless still highly positive. This slight decline may be a "ceiling effect", and may also be due to the timing of the second survey; students' evaluations of program satisfaction can increase between the end of a program and a later time after they have had time to recover from the stress of the experience and reflect upon it (Langen and Welsh, 2006).