A survey of the University of California's 170,000 students has underlined the importance of offering research projects to undergraduates at research universities.

Published by the Center for Studies in Higher Education, Engaged Learning in a Public University: Trends in the undergraduate experience analysed the results of a 2008 census of UC undergraduate students as part of the centre's ongoing Student Experience in the Research University Project.

The online survey focuses on the unique environment of research universities and the challenges they face. Since 2004, the survey has been administered to students across all nine of the university's undergraduate campuses

New to the 2008 survey were questions addressing the extent to which upper division undergraduates were engaged in faculty-supervised research projects as well as data on learning gains gleaned from student self-assessments.

Among its findings, the latest survey revealed that women and under-represented minority students reported participating in undergraduate research at rates comparable to men and non-minority students.

The survey found significantly more science, technology, engineering and mathematics majors (43%) participated in upper-year research projects than did their humanities/arts and social science counterparts (26%)

While the STEM students opted to participate in the projects for a variety of reasons - as volunteers, for pay and for independent study credits - the others tended to do so only for student research credits.

Self-assessed learning outcomes suggested several trends about the enhancement of analytical and critical skills among undergraduates from their first to fourth years, notably among minorities and for undergraduates in the humanities/arts programmes.

By comparison with other research universities in the US, it is clear the UC undergraduates are generally more research active: in fact, as many as 33% undergraduates are ,compared with the national average of just one in five, or 19%.

The latter figure comes from findings based on National Survey of Student Engagement data, published by the American Council of Learned Societies with the Teagle Foundation in 2007 (Student Learning and Faculty Research).

Although the trends in this report generally paralleled those of the UC survey, they did so at consistently lower levels: thus, 35% STEM majors in 2007 had similar research engagement opportunities compared with 22% humanities/arts and social sciences students.

Can generalised conclusions be drawn from this survey? John A Douglass, the survey's co-principal investigator, believes they can be.

"As a major producer of the world's future educated labour force, research universities have a special responsibility to create learning environments that produce strong analytical and leadership skills among their students, that fosters creativity, and that, ultimately, makes their alumni productive and influential members of society," Douglass says.

Inspired by the 1998 Boyer Commission's report Reinventing Undergraduate Education , which emphasised the efficacy of implementing 'learning as inquiry' models of education, the student experience project is committed to promoting a culture of institutional self-improvement.

This is not an easy task in today's economy and in the context of rapidly changing pedagogical paradigms. Acknowledging the challenges, Douglass adds that "universities do have much room to be more creative ... [They must] assess their strengths, including their research prowess, and integrate those strengths into the first degree programme of students".

Better understanding of the undergraduate experience means policies can be implemented to improve the quality of programming and its outcomes. For this reason, the project extended its analysis in 2008 by establishing a consortium of major US universities seeking to gather institutional, comparative and longitudinal data on the impacts of research mentorship on upper level undergraduate students.

To date, 16 American research universities belong to the consortium and a number of similar institutions in Asia and Europe have been invited to join.

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