Symposium 2017

Teaching students about research is an important focus of teaching and learning in higher education across disciplines and across contexts. As students proceed through undergraduate programs, they are asked to seek knowledge from various sources, assess the knowledge, and make connection between the information presented and their respective courses in their chosen discipline. Increasingly, universities and faculty realize the value of undergraduates not just reading about research in their courses, but actually learning how do conduct academic research and how research contributes to knowledge. However, as funding is scarce, these research assistant opportunities usually go to graduate students.  Literature speaks to various learning potentials graduate students enjoy from their roles as research assistants: some speak to the ethical obligation of a professor to a graduate research assistant (McGinn, Niemczyk, Saudelli, 2013); some speak to the role of mentoring in research assistantships; team work and collaboration (Hulse-Killacky & Robinson, 2005); and some speak to research identity and confidence (Niemczyk, 2010). The commonality is that all of these studies explore graduate research assistantships and all are in a North American context. Undergraduate research assistantships including international research assistantships as a pedagogical site for learning is an underexplored area of study regarding researcher learning potential. This research study is a multiple self-study of the research assistants and faculty mentors learning about scholarship through engaging as research assistants in a qualitative case study in 3 secondary schools in Qatar, the Middle East. The research question is: What is involved in mentoring international, undergraduate research assistantships in educational scholarship?