Goals

When a student undertakes an internship as a research assistant or takes a lab or field course often the goal is to introduce the student to research. Two of the common reasons students say they want to participate in research are to gain research experience and develop career ideas.
However, in my experience the goal of gaining research is experience is vague. So what should the student learn? Here I outline general and specific concepts and skills I feel students should learn in gaining ‘research experience’. These goals are skills and knowledge that students must have if they are to graduate and become scientists, whether in industry, government, non-profit or an academic environment. This list may be idealistic for a short course or internship, but could be used as a high goal. I strongly feel that a graduating student should learn the following and it may take multiple years of research experience to achieve. I would appreciate any comments, feedbacks and additions.

A student should develop an understanding of how research is conducted. While an advanced student has likely read from the primary literature and taken classes reviewing experimental results, they are less likely to understand how science is really done. Science is not the straightforward description in the methods section of a paper, it is a long challenging process. Students in the scientists have undoubtedly learned the scientific method. However, they may not be comfortable with how scientists read the primary literature and make observations in order to generate hypotheses. Likewise, the processes of using a hypothesis to developing an experiment and conducting an experiment may also be new. Students must also learn how to collect, manage and analyze data. The research process is lengthy and challenging.

Students should learn about experimental design. While a through treatment is probably best handled in a statistics classroom, there are several important concepts. Students should understand why replication is necessary and treatments are randomized. In collecting data, an appreciation for experimental and sampling error is needed.

Often underappreciated is the ability to manage data. Students should gain an appreciation for the data collection, but should also understand where the data goes and that data must be properly stored and documented to be valuable. In addition to data entry, students should learn to check data and describe the data with standardized metadata.

Finally, to truly become a scientist, a student must become a critical thinker. This step is beyond understanding how research is conducted and understanding the subject. A student must be able to turn observations and gaps in the literature into hypotheses and experiments. This process may be the most daunting, but is crucial to the student’s development.

In my next blog, I will address how we as instructors can teach students to achieve some of these goals.