Assessment Tools

CUR has partnered with Heather Haeger, California State University-Monterey Bay, to serve as CUR’s inaugural Assessment Research Coordinator. Heather Haeger, in coordination with CUR’s Assessment Task Force and Executive Board, has been working to develop a comprehensive set of assessment resources and tools. Please use the links below to learn more about helping to assess undergraduate research on your campus and contributing to CUR’s assessment of the status of undergraduate research.

Assessment Strategies and Ideas

The first step in assessment is defining what (and who) you are counting as participants in undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative inquiry on your campus and setting a consistent practice for tracking participation.

In deciding how to track participation, thinking about what you need to know and what you might assess, consider other items to track in addition to participation:

  • Who does research? 
  • How much and/or for how long? 
  • With what intensity or rigor? 
  • Is there funding for undergraduate researchers and their mentors, and, if so, from whom?
  • What is the product or outcome of the undergraduate research? 
  • Where do undergraduate students conduct their research (in-class, out-of-class, or a combination thereof)?

See more examples of how other institutions have tracked and assessed undergraduate research in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research (SPUR) and the following literature reviews:

Assessment Toolkit

CUR’s Assessment Task Force is creating an Assessment Toolkit for CUR members to use. The following are available resources:

CUR White Paper No. 1 (2019)

Undergraduate Research: A Road Map for Meeting Future National Needs and Competing in a World of Change
Joanne D. Altman, Tsu-Ming Chiang, Christian S. Hamann, Huda Makhluf, Virginia Peterson, and Sara E. Orel

Open-Source Assessment Bibliography

Prior research assessing undergraduate research can be found in the following Zotero library: Assessment.

Use the tags in Zotero, located on the left side of the screen to sort articles by topic. Tags starting with “*CUR_” such as *CUR Student Outcomes are tags created by CUR

Survey Instruments Used to Assess Undergraduate Research

Webinars

Assessment Strategies for Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (June 13, 2018)

Surveying the Impact: Using Survey Methods to Assess Undergraduate Research (December 13, 2017)