This card features six workshops that introduce students to principles of both entrepreneurial mindset (EM) and undergraduate research, highlighting the benefits of teaching EM to undergraduate researchers from the start. Our workshops help students identify opportunities and stakeholders as they start a research project. Students can then leverage a combination of research skills and EM concepts to move their projects forward.

Each workshop includes video content, a moderator guide, and student slides or worksheets. The workshops are designed to be facilitated by a workshop moderator and can be deployed either in person or virtually. 

Background:

For over a decade, KEEN faculty have introduced entrepreneurial mindset (EM) in undergraduate classes. While this has improved undergraduate engineering education, EM has not been widely incorporated into undergraduate research (UGR) experiences. The work presented in this card is part of a broader project (see An EM-Driven Framework for Undergraduate Research) to introduce a framework for implementing the 3C’s into research activities to foster EM and use EM to address common challenges in undergraduate research.

This card is part of a larger package of resources and focuses on early engagement of students. 

Card 3583 provides resources to educate faculty on ways to engage undergraduate students in research.

Card 3165 provides videos and instructor guides to help faculty and students understand how research can impact their career and service.

All of these cards are open to adaptation and adoption.

Additional Context:

The student research training workshops described in this card are designed to help students identify opportunities and stakeholders as they start a research project and then leverage a combination of research skills and EM concepts to continue to move their projects forward. Workshop topics include framing research questions with EM, building resilience in research, thriving in a research environment, developing a research pitch, using EM to drive effective data presentation, and focusing next steps in research to maximize research impact.

In designing our interventions, we considered alignment with guidelines provided by the Council on Undergraduate Research, which include curating engaging and high‐impact opportunities, creating a community of student scholars, peer mentoring, opportunities for early and sustained involvement, and program assessment [1].

What’s in this card: 

There is a playlist of videos created for these workshops. View the playlist here:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvITFYQeu1sE9DpNF2RDiHy0tdrXF4v6y

• Workshop 1: Framing Your Research Question with EM
• Workshop 2: Thriving in a Research Environment
• Workshop 3: Building Resilience in Research
• Workshop 4: Pitching Your Research
• Workshop 5: Using EM to Drive Effective Data Visualization
• Workshop 6: Maximizing the Impact of Your Research
  

View implementation strategies in the Instructor Tips section. 

Each workshop has a series of student learning objectives. After completing the workshops, students should be able to...

Each workshop is designed to be completed in approximately 1 hour. The instructor guides for each workshop have more details on materials and preparation time required for each workshop. We have successfully offered the workshops as a research bootcamp (student complete all six workshops over 1-2 days) and as a workshop series spread over a semester or summer.

Implementation Strategies & Tips

• Along with the instructor guide, make sure to look at the "Notes" section of the instructor slide decks. In the notes, we've included additional text for helping instructors introduce activities and highlight main discussion points for each workshop.
• We have offered the workshops in order (Workshop 1 through Workshop 6), but each workshop can stand alone as well, if you only have time to offer a portion of the series or would like to offer them in a different order.
• The instructor guide for each workshop also includes tips on adapting the workshops for virtual learning.

We will continue to update this section with new implementation strategies and updates from faculty as they deploy these modules.

To assess the impact of our workshop-based interventions on student research productivity and attitudes toward research, we developed a retrospective, post-experience survey and a one-year follow-up survey for students participating in the workshops. Results are currently being collected and analyzed.

Additional details on the survey development and implementation can be found in our ASEE conference paper "Development of entrepreneurial mindset-driven training materials for undergraduate researchers" [2], which is included in the Related Publications section. A document with our full set of survey questions is available in the Assessment folder below.