A typology of undergraduate biology research experiences in Ontario

We used an operational definition of undergraduate research informed by Lopatto (2003), Griffiths (2004), and Auchincloss et al. (2014; see Fig. 1) and most recently used by Buchanan and Fisher (2022) in their systematic review of CUREs. Specifically, we define UREs as experiences that engage students in intensive activities that mirror the processes of research and meet the five elements of UREs outlined in Auchincloss et al. (2014): (1) engagement in scientific practices, (2) exploration of questions with unknown answers to expose students to the process of scientific discovery, (3) examination of topics with relevance that extends beyond the course, (4) collaboration (with either peers or mentors), and (5) authentic “messy” data that demonstrate the iterative processes of science. The specific course formats, components, and teaching practices by which these are achieved can vary substantially in terms of purpose, accessibility, and structure (Beckman and Hensel 2009).

Some literature on UREs includes both traditional and inquiry-based laboratory courses within their operational definition. Traditional laboratories are those which are methods-driven, presenting content that is instructor-defined and pre-determined, with outcomes that are known to both students and to the instructor (Auchincloss et al. 2014). Inquiry laboratory courses differ from traditional laboratories as they focus on challenging students to explore genuine scientific thinking and to generate their own methods, while seeking to answer questions with answers that are unknown to both the instructor and students (Auchincloss et al. 2014; Sun, Graves, and Oliver 2020). Though the Auchincloss et al. (2014) model of essential elements was specifically developed for CUREs, they are broadly applicable to UREs and we refer to them interchangeably here.  By design, our definition excludes both types of laboratory courses, as neither course-type meets all five of the essential elements of UREs as defined by Auchincloss et al. (2014). While inquiry laboratories place emphasis on challenging the students to inquire in general, they do not necessarily require the students to ask questions that have relevance beyond the course.

Additionally, for the purposes of this research, we focussed exclusively on undergraduate research courses that were embedded in the curriculum and offered for credit, though there are a range of extra-curricular and non-credit opportunities, including volunteering, co-op positions, summer research fellowships, and other employment which could offer elements of or entire UREs but are not strictly required to (Beckman and Hensel 2009; Sun, Graves, and Oliver 2020). Notably, our study of for-credit courses includes honours theses that, unlike the United States but similar to both the UK and Australia, are offered as research courses within the curriculum.

The course characteristics used to describe the UREs investigated in this study were guided by both observed differences in characteristics derived from the course syllabi and existing frameworks of course descriptors in the literature. Specifically, Beckman and Hensel (2009) summarized several continua along which institutions may define undergraduate research models that differ in purpose, accessibility, and structure. For instance, UREs may be process-centered or outcome/product-centered, individual, or group-based, and/or they may be broadly available to all students or reserved for the students with the highest level of academic achievement. These continua, along with characteristics derived from the course syllabi, were used to characterize and describe the UREs offered in biology programs at 14 universities in Ontario, Canada.

The post-secondary context in Ontario consists of 21 publicly funded universities (20 primarily English speaking and 1 exclusively French speaking), of which 18 offer a BSc program in Biology. This research will focus on 14 of these institutions, which represent the diversity of the Ontario post-secondary context (see Table 1). These 14 universities were selected because they are active members of the Ontario Universities Program in Field Biology (OUPFB), which is a collaborative initiative across Ontario universities to pool field course resources. The OUPFB allows students from one institution to enroll in field courses offered by other member institutions without having to transfer credits. All field courses offered through the OUPFB include an intensive research project component, and therefore it is convenient to sample from member institutions. The student population of these universities ranges from 7900 to 87 000 and they are located in both major cities and smaller regional centres. Three of these institutions offer primarily undergraduate programs, while the other 11 have comprehensive programs that offer undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees and have substantial research activity.

For-credit UREs in undergraduate biology courses were included in this study. A database of these research courses was developed by reviewing the 2019 course calendars for the biology program(s) at each institution for courses that included the search terms “research”, “project”, “group”, “field”, “laboratory”, or “thesis” in their posted course description. The OUPFB course offerings were also included as all of these courses require a research project to be completed while on the field course. This process resulted in 80 undergraduate biology research courses across all 14 universities. We obtained the syllabus for each course from either publicly available online databases or by contacting course faculty or administrative staff by email. We restrict our analysis to syllabus information only because these documents are publicly available and most immediately accessible to all students. Several courses did not have a standard syllabus as some or all of the components of the course were to be negotiated between the student and their supervisor. In these cases, we contacted the faculty or administrator who coordinated the course most recently to obtain the required information where available. One course was removed from analysis because a department administrator indicated that it was not regularly offered, no faculty had recently taught it, and no syllabus existed. Two course codes were removed because they accounted for programs that were too variable to be captured in this analysis. Research experiences that required two courses to be taken sequentially or concurrently were included only once.

The collected syllabi (n = 77) were reviewed to ensure that the courses met the stated operational definition of engaging students in intensive activities that mirrored the process of research and included the five elements of UREs outlined in Auchincloss et al. (2014). Typically, this constituted courses that included a substantial lab- or field-based project requiring students to work independently or as a member of a group to develop research questions, to organize and/or analyze data, and to disseminate the results of their research. In many courses, this process also involved data collection; however, courses where students worked with previously collected data were also included. One course was removed from the initial database because the project referenced in the course description was described as a series of lab assignments instead of a cohesive research project.

Of the 76 undergraduate biology research courses included in this study, we collected complete information for 15 variables of interest from 62 courses by consulting the syllabus and/or the course faculty/administrators. Variables related to the relative weight of the assessments (seven variables) were missing from 14 courses, because these courses allowed students to negotiate the weight of their assignments with their instructors. Eight variables were still collected for these courses by consulting with course faculty/administrators.

The variables used in the analysis are described in Table 2.

Eight variables were collected from the syllabi for all 76 research courses to characterize the courses based on their format: (1) credit worth, (2) length in weeks, (3) cost in addition to tuition, (4) semester offered, (5) minimum grade requirement, (6) application requirement, (7) number of students per staff, and (8) % of grade from group work.

Course characteristics were derived from the syllabi to differentiate the courses based on several continua along which institutions may define undergraduate research models. For instance, UREs may be individual or group-based, and they may be broadly available to all students or reserved for the students with the highest level of academic achievement (Beckman and Hensel 2009). Elements that could constitute barriers to access were also identified and included as variables. As these variables were derived from the syllabi, the range of variables was limited by which variables were available across all or most syllabi included in the analysis. The rationale for each of the variables included in this analysis is described in Table 2.

The credit value of courses was standardized to a 2.5 credit full-time semester. This was based on the credit system at the University of Guelph, where most single semester courses have a credit value of 0.50 and a full-time course load is typically 2.50 credits per semester and 5.00 credits per academic year. Among the study institutions, this credit system is shared with Brock University, Carleton University, Lakehead University, Trent University, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, Western University, and Wilfrid Laurier University. Laurentian, McMaster, Queens, Ottawa, and York Universities follow a credit system where full-time enrollment is 15 credits per semester. Therefore, the course values at these institutions were divided by 6 for the analysis (i.e., a 3.00 credit course is the equivalent of a 0.50 credit course). The length of the course in weeks was also included to capture the intensity of the course.

The courses offered through the OUPFB typically occur off campus and therefore they are offered at an additional cost to students. Some non-OUPFB courses also charge a small fee in addition to tuition for the cost of field trips and course resources. These additional fees were included as a variable. The timing of course offerings as during the typical academic year (i.e., fall and winter semesters) or in the summer semester is also an important variable because courses offered only in the summer may not be accessible to students who rely on summer employment to pay for their education. Courses that were offered during the academic year were recorded as “yes”, while those offered exclusively outside of the typical academic year were recorded as “No”.  The primary location of course instruction (on-campus vs. off-campus) was also initially included but was determined to be redundant to the “academic year vs. summer semester” variable, as all courses that occurred during the academic year occurred on campus, while all those which occurred at an off-campus field site, occurred exclusively during the summer semester.  Therefore the “campus vs. off-campus” variable was removed.

Many research courses have competitive enrollment and only a small subset of students are accepted. The degree to which enrollment was competitive was captured by whether there was a minimum grade required for enrollment (yes and no) and if an application was required to enroll (yes and no).

The ratio of students per teaching staff was used to capture the capacity for frequent student interactions with staff. In courses where a student was working directly with a supervisor, the class size was recorded as one. In all other instances, the class capacity was divided by the number of instructors listed on the course syllabus, plus one teaching assistant (assumed, unless otherwise stated). Student interactions with peers is also an important course variable, and so the capacity for these interactions was captured by the % of a student’s grade accounted for by group work.

Seven variables related to assessment type were collected from the courses that had pre-determined assessments (n = 62). Therefore, 14 courses were excluded from this analysis as the weight and type of assessments were determined through negotiations between the instructor and the student and were therefore not available in the course syllabus. These courses were all apprenticeship-style courses where the student works one-on-one with the instructor to complete a research project. The seven assessment variables collected were: (1) the total number of assignments, (2) % of grade from oral presentations, (3) % of grade from written assignments, (4) the % of grade from reflective assignments or activities, (5) the % of grade from research effort/participation, (6) the % of grade from data entry or laboratory/field notes, and (7) the % of grade from quizzes or examinations. There were no examples of assessments that did not meet the criteria for one of these categories.

We used two categorical principal component analyses (PCA) to observe clustering of courses and to classify the research courses into types by each of the course descriptive variables and by the assessment variables. This approach is based upon an analysis of class size using course outline and enrollment data by Cash et al. (2017) and an analysis of the characteristics of residence learning communities derived from the websites of nine Canadian universities by Hobbins et al. (2016). PCA is a statistical tool used to reduce multi-dimensional data into fewer dimensions by creating component groups of correlated variables. By graphing the courses based on their scores on the first two principal components, clusters of courses are created allowing us to visualize the various groups. The PCA was performed using the FactoMineR and factoextra packages in R Statistical Program (R Core Team 2020). For the course descriptive variables, principal component 1 (51.2%) and 2 (21.7%) accounted for 73% of the variance in the dataset. The contributions of each variable to the course descriptive principal components are shown in Table 3. For the assessment variables, principal component 1 (25.2%) and 2 (23.9%) accounted for 49.1% of the variance in the dataset. The contributions of each variable to the assessment principal components are shown inTable 4.

Type A courses (N = 37, 49% of the sample) include courses in which a student works under direct, one-on-one supervision of an expert, usually a faculty researcher, to conduct authentic research in an area related to the researcher’s expertise. The Type A course model closely resembles the apprenticeship model described in the literature.

Type A research courses typically have a greater credit value and are more likely to be two semester courses. These courses are often called a “thesis project” or “independent study” in the course description and are nearly exclusively offered to upper year students. Research projects are completed independently and lack the group work component that is typical of other courses in this typology. Research in Type A courses may be lab, field, or literature-based and aims primarily to engage students in the processes of authentic research. Examples of learning goals include, “Students are expected to design a self-guided research question and project at the level expected for a fourth-year independent research project within the constraints imposed by the course” (BIOL 4522, University of Guelph) and “Students should be able to conduct research. Evaluate and analyze the data collected. Write and present a final thesis based on the research conducted.” (BIOL 4970 F, Western University). Students are usually expected to attend frequent meetings with their supervisor and the supervisor’s research group, which may result in a peer network comparable to the group assignments in other course types. In some cases, students are expected to take on additional responsibilities such as contributing to their labmates’ research projects and tidying/maintaining the lab space.

The process of enrollment in Type A courses can be very similar to a job application, “Since students are not just taking a course but are also collaborating in the research program of a faculty member, faculty make BIOL537 offers to students based on their applications.” (BIOL537, Queen's University). A total of 72.97% of Type A courses had a minimum GPA requirement to enroll, with requirements ranging from 63% to 80%, with a mean minimum GPA of 73%. Type A courses also always required some form of application to enroll; however, the application process ranges in intensity from simply having to meet the eligibility requirements (BIOL 4F90/4F91, Brock University) or finding a willing supervisor (BIO481, University of Toronto) to more extensive applications that may require a research proposal, a CV, an exemplary transcript, a cover letter, and/or academic references (BIO4009, University of Ottawa). Enrollment based on the discretion of a potential supervisor is also likely to involve a comprehensive application and “job” interview.

The weight and type of assessments in Type A courses are often negotiated between the student and supervisor (n = 14 in our sample). When pre-structured assessments do exist, they tend to have fewer assignments overall and are based on oral presentations, writing, and participation/professionalism/effort, as opposed to tests, lab/field notes, or reflective activities. However, there is a lot of variability in the total number of assessments (ranging from 2 to 12) and the relative weight of written works vs. oral presentations and participation, which tend to co-vary. Often scaffolding of writing instruction is built into the assessment structure, such that students are required to hand in drafts of writing for editing prior to the submission of their final written assignment.

In general, apprenticeship research courses act as an introduction to graduate research. Indeed, these courses are often geared specifically towards students who have an interest in pursuing graduate studies, “This course is strongly recommended for students contemplating graduate work in Biology, or who are interested in pursuing a career in research of any kind.” (BIO-4C12, McMaster University).

Type B courses (N = 31, 40.8% of the sample) are characterized by their scheduling outside of the academic year, additional cost, requirement for an application, and a higher student to advisor/instructor ratio than Type A courses. These courses are usually described as “field courses”. Most of these courses are offered through the OUPFB and are available to students at all 14 institutions; however, four of them are offered only by the University of Toronto (EEB 398H1, EEB 3981, EEB 3982, EEB 3983). While these four course offerings differed from the OUPFB courses in length (longer), and cost (no additional cost), they still fell within the field course cluster.

Type B courses are short, intensive courses offered during the summer semester at a field research site in Canada or abroad. In some cases, these sites may expose students to new and uncomfortable circumstances, “Biting insects (particularly mosquitoes and black flies) are present in extreme abundance at certain sites. It is absolutely essential to bring a high-quality bug jacket as well as pants that insects can't bite through.” (AEC, University of Guelph). Due to their short duration, Type B are very intensive, featuring long days with few breaks over the 2 week duration. Typically, students and faculty live on-site for the duration of the course and share meals and free-time together. In these cases, accommodations range from tents, to comfortable dormitory style residences, “Sleeping accommodations are student dorms (up to four in a room and gender specific).” (SEB, McMaster University). Students spend some portion of the first week of the course learning about the field site and working to develop research questions and hypotheses. During the second week of the course, students begin data collection and analysis for their independent or small group research project. Dissemination of the research results is usually due at a date several weeks to several months after the return from the field site.

Students are expected to take on additional responsibilities at the field site, including cooking meals, tidying common spaces, and assisting with ongoing research occurring at the research station. Finally, unlike other courses, there is an element of tourism included in Type B courses. Students may participate in whale watching on the East Coast of Canada (MBO, University of Guelph), safari in East Africa (BCE, Queen’s University), and snorkeling on a remote island in Belize (TME, Western University). This exploration of novel and exciting places is an intentional aspect of many of the field courses included in this analysis, “We designed the class to encompass the most beautiful places we know from this part of the world” (WEA, University of Ottawa).

The process of enrollment in Type B courses typically involves a competitive application. Students who have met the course prerequisites must submit an application specifying the top three OUPFB field courses of interest and their complete academic record. In some cases, students are also required to provide background on their past field and research experiences and their career goals. While some courses indicate that students who have met the prerequisites are enrolled on a first come, first serve basis, others indicate that the course instructors may select successful applicants from the application pool based on merit. While some of the applications do specify that enrollment may be based on a competitive GPA, no specific GPA requirements are stated. Unlike Type A and C courses, Type B courses typically come at an additional cost on top of tuition, to pay for accommodations, travel, and course resources. This additional cost can range from CDN$700 for relatively local field sites (TFB, University of Toronto) to over CDN$5000 for field sites overseas (WEA, University of Ottawa).

Relative to Type A courses, Type B courses are more likely to involve group work, perhaps due to larger class sizes. Importantly, while group work is associated with learning gains, we did not find evidence of a curriculum in skills related to group work in this study. The patterns of types and weights of assessments in field-based research courses were variable, with some Type B courses involving major written components and others being largely based on assignments related to keeping field or laboratory notes. Compared to Type A courses, Type B courses are more likely to be assessed via lab/field notebooks, reflective activities, and tests. Written assessments typically have less weight on final grades. Oral presentations are the least common/lowest weighted form of assessment during field courses overall.

Type C research courses (N = 8, 10.5% of the sample) were a less distinct course type in our sample, with relatively few exemplars and greater variability in course characteristics and assessment types. Type C courses were only found at four universities, including the University of Guelph, the University of Waterloo, Western University, and York University. We found that Type C courses are primarily characterized by not requiring students to apply to enroll. These courses also trend towards a greater student-to-staff ratio and a greater emphasis on group work. Therefore, the Type C classification best aligns with the CURE model described in the literature.

Type C courses are often described as “experiential learning” courses in the course description. Like other research courses, the goal of Type C courses is to provide students with an opportunity to participate in authentic research, as demonstrated by this learning outcome: “Plan and execute an independent field research project, from development of the experimental question or hypothesis to be tested, to design and implementation of the sampling or data acquisition, choosing the appropriate statistical or other analytical methods for the data or samples acquired, presenting the results graphically and in writing…” (BIOL 3230, Western University). However, unlike the other course types in this typology, Type C courses are built into the standard curriculum and allow students to conduct authentic research without having to meet GPA requirements or to apply for more competitive research opportunities. This is achieved by having larger class sizes, making enrollment non-competitive. The on-campus location of Type C courses also removes potential barriers associated with travel and living away from home, while participating in a Type B course, “Local field sites will be used to run in-course experiments” (BIOL 3010, University of Guelph).

Of the eight Type C courses included in our analysis, three focus primarily on field-based research (BIOL 3010 and BIOL 4110, University of Guelph; BIOL 3230; Western University), four focus primarily on lab-based research (IBIO 4600, University of Guelph; BIOL3250, York University; BIOL 349, University of Waterloo; BIOL 4998, Western University), and one did not specify the research approach, as the project involved collaborating with a community partner and could involve either laboratory or field work depending on each student’s specific project (IBIO 3100/4100, University of Guelph). The course formats are also quite variable, with some emphasizing lecture content (BIOL 3250, York University) and others focusing on experiential field excursions (BIOL 3230, Western University). Nearly all courses indicated that some lecture time would be spent discussing statistics, doing student presentations, and/or hearing guest speakers.

While the topics of research in other course types are often limited by the student’s ability to find an advisor or by the practical considerations of the field site, Type C research courses may be limited in scope by the course requirements. For instance, in BIOL3010 (University of Guelph), students are required to work in teams to investigate four research topics that are pre-determined by the instructors. While the scope may be limited, the learning outcomes in Type C courses include many of the same components as the other URE types, including planning and executing a research project and developing an appreciation for the process of research; “Learning outcomes: … To appreciate the diversity, beauty, intricacies and opportunities involved in conducting ecological research” (BIOL 4110, University of Guelph).