Undergraduates need better guidance on research projects

Chronicle of Higher Education : Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg of the University of Washington in Seattle have analyzed the written guidance that a wide sample of US undergraduates received from their professors when assigned research projects. In most cases, the handouts gave clear instructions on how the eventual research paper should appear, but lacked big-picture advice on how to conduct research. Another common feature of the research assignments, the Chronicle‘s Kelly Truong reports, was an adherence to the traditional single-author paper. The option for teams to submit multimedia studies was rarely offered.